


NEVER PAY THE REAPER WITH LOVE ONLY

by ivorygates



Series: Waterloo'verse [3]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Dark, F/M, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-21
Updated: 2011-02-21
Packaged: 2017-11-21 19:06:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 47,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivorygates/pseuds/ivorygates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's always known she was going to run someday. Her method takes him by surprise, though. (Jackson could always surprise him.) But this is about her last chance: next month the Stargate Program goes quietly public. A closed series of meetings at the UN - she's supposed to give the keynote address - and it will be a secret for exactly <em>five minutes</em> after that. And for the last six months (since they started preparing for the Program to go public) he's been watching Jackson's careful little plans. About half of them he knows about, in that secret <em>we just won't talk about this</em> way they have, because he always thought she'd ask him to go along with her wherever she went. And now he knows she isn't.</p>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>-O-</p>
</div>It's 2017, do you know where your sanity (or your memories) are? This is an AU sequel to "Waterloo Bridge" (i.e., I don't believe it is the Real-For-True way the story ends: SUE ME.) No sex, but angst, mutilation, murder, torture, glorification of suicide THIS IS DARKFIC PEOPLE I AM WARNING YOU NOW and oh yeah: enough schmoop to require insulin IVs in the susceptible.
            </blockquote>





	NEVER PAY THE REAPER WITH LOVE ONLY

"I stole it," Jackson says simply, holding out the little phial out on the palm of her hand. It's half-full of a brown tarry sludge. "You need to cut it down with neutral saline to inject it. But, um, the dose is pretty small. I think. Um, not like we ever ran tests on it. I don't know. Maybe they did somewhere." She shrugs minutely.

"What is it?" Cam doesn't take it, she doesn't withdraw her hand.

"Dargol."

She waits. She knows he has a good memory. Once, a long time ago, she called him a groupie. And it takes him a few minutes, but he remembers. Almost fifteen years ago now, on a planet a long ways away, a biochemist as brilliant as she was pretty much evil was working on a drug that she hoped would be her bolt-hole. Fountain of Youth, turn the clock back on her, make her young again so nobody'd know what she looked like and she'd have another lifetime to do what she wanted without anybody looking for Linea, Destroyer of Worlds. It worked just fine. Turned the body clock back to the early twenties. And it scrubbed the mind clean of all personal identity. She'd made it up as a gas, and it had affected the entire planetary population of Vyus.

"Did you bring the antidote?" The antidote only reverses the amnesia.

"It's volatile. The Dargol isn't. This is the last of the original sample we got from Vyus. Doesn't matter." Her eyes tell him what she doesn't want to say: _I'm tired. I don't want to be who I am. I don't want to do this any more. I can't. You know why._

He's always known she was going to run someday. Her method takes him by surprise, though. (Jackson could always surprise him.) But this is about her last chance: next month the Stargate Program goes quietly public. A closed series of meetings at the UN - she's supposed to give the keynote address - and it will be a secret for exactly _five minutes_ after that. And for the last six months (since they started preparing for the Program to go public) he's been watching Jackson's careful little plans. About half of them he knows about, in that secret _we just won't talk about this_ way they have, because he always thought she'd ask him to go along with her wherever she went. And now he knows she isn't.

He's got a month's leave. Planning to drive home (he likes to drive, when he has the time) and spend it with the family (hoping to, knowing that Jackson would be making her break soon, whatever it would be, knowing he couldn't go with her and he couldn't hide her and still not knowing what to do to save her.) He'd been sitting in on the early meetings with her and the IOC (when they'd all still been talking to each other; before Jackson had just gone off to her office and started writing fifty-page memos instead), where they'd been planning to have her chair the UN talks as "The Woman Who Opened The Stargate." He suspects she'd figured she'd probably survive about a month of public life before some crazy with a high-powered rifle decided to put a bullet through her brain in the name of God knew what. She'd saved the planet more times than anybody knew. She wasn't asking for a medal, or a parade, or even her life back. She was just asking to _stop giving_ before they took away the only thing she still had: her anonymity.

And they wouldn't let her.

"Don't you think this is a pretty goddamned stupid idea?" he asks.

"Yeah," she says. "Probably." She tosses the bottle into the trash without looking.

#

Six Valium in a glass of Scotch would knock out a horse. She's built up a tolerance over the years. He's pretty sure she doesn't know what she's drinking, but she has to know (afterward) that he's drugged her. She doesn't comment, doesn't ask why. She's pliable when he takes her off to the bedroom a few hours later, drowsy when they make love. They're always making love, even when she's screaming curses at him. But she's quickly asleep afterward, and he knows the hallmarks of a deep drugged sleep by now. He gets out of the bed and pulls on a pair of sweats. Goes to the trash.

The bottle is still there. Not even cracked.

They have neutral saline. They have a lot of things. He reconstitutes the sludge into liquid form and cuts it until it's a pale amber liquid. How much should he give? Vein or muscle? Is there a fatal dose? The mission reports didn't say. He cuts it one last time - the liquid is straw-colored now - and goes with intramuscular. She doesn't even stir.

He wonders what he's going to do if he's killed her. But this is the same thing, isn't it? Because if it _has_ worked, the only thing he can do is walk back into the SGC and say: "Oh hey. My girlfriend took Dargol. Do you think you might happen to have the _cure_ lying around here somewhere?"

God only knows what would happen to her.

He puts the bottle and everything he's used with the drug into a bowl full of bleach to soak. It should destroy the chemical and all traces. He'll wash the liquid down the sink before they leave, and throw out the bits and pieces when they're on the road. It's the best he can do to cover his tracks. Then he goes to pack for her. T-shirts and underwear, a few items of clothing (they'll buy more when he gets home); medications, one of her clean ID packets (gives her name as Alex Tyler, and the birthdate won't match her looks, but it's a place to start), and that big satchel of cash in the back of her closet he wasn't officially supposed to know about. He searches it first, and he's glad he does. The gun and the ammo he leaves. The photos and the patch he takes out and puts back into her drawer. _Sorry, baby. Sorry._

When he goes back to check on her she's feverish, tossing and turning. Good sign or bad? No way to know. He gets back into the bed and holds her and waits.

#

The windows are bright with dawn when she stirs, raising her head from his shoulder. She yawns and stretches, then stares at him, blank puzzlement shading to confusion.

She was stunning the first time he saw her. In a: _welcome to my nightmare_ kind of way, because when you had her attention it was like being stalked by a leopard, and when you didn't, you were trying to decide whether you wanted it or not. At chemically-recreated twenty, she has a wide-eyed elfin loveliness that's simply dazzling.

She smiles at him. Cautiously. Hopefully. "I don't..." she says.

"It's Cam, baby," he says.

He watches as her lips silently form his name - _Cam_ \- trying to form a connection with memories she doesn't have any more. She looks around, realizes (at last) that she's naked, pulls the sheet up slowly. "I'm in your bed."

"You don't need to worry about anything," he tells her. "We'll get up, get dressed, hit the road. We're going home."

"We're not home now?" she asks. Still puzzled, but not worrying now, because he isn't _(doesn't seem to be)_ worrying, and eight hours ago he couldn't have fooled her for a minute.

"Oh no, no. Home's North Carolina." He gets out of bed, gets his robe from the bathroom, brings it and lays it on the bed. She hasn't moved. He wonders if she's shy. He wonders if Jackson was shy at twenty.

She shakes her head, smiling ruefully. "Cam, I know you aren't going to believe this, but ... I can't remember my name."

He puts a hand under her chin and tips her face up. She looks up at him trustingly. "Your name is Alex. Short for Alexandria. Everybody calls you 'Alex,' though."

"Okay," she says, nodding.

#

They're gone twenty minutes later. His suitcase was already in the car. All they take from the apartment is her two bags, a small sack of trash that Cam will toss at a convenient stop along the way, and a narrow collar of black leather that Cam carries coiled up in his pocket.

#

He's been away from Colorado Springs two weeks when O'Neill comes.

It's the end of August, and they're all sitting out in the long summer twilight one night after supper - Momma and the aunts on one end of the porch knitting and talking, Daddy and the uncles at the other end of the porch shooting the breeze. Cam and Alex and some of the cousins are in the front yard playing horseshoes, and she's giggly on half a beer. Everybody stops what they're doing when the shiny tiny rental car comes bumping up the drive - probably somebody lost, because their mailbox is about the only one on the road for a while here, and if whoever it is has been good and lost for a while, they're probably frantic enough to turn in. Cam's got Alex tucked under his arm and is walking toward the car to be helpful when the driver door opens up and O'Neill levers himself out. Civilian clothes - jeans and a t-shirt and a flannel shirt over even in the dead of summer. Looks like everybody else in the county until you get to his eyes.

"Mitchell," he says.

"Sir," Mitchell says.

O'Neill's gaze slides right past Alex once, then back. "Aren't you going to introduce us?" he asks, and his voice is pleasant and friendly, and his face is smiling, but oh, God, Cam can see it in his eyes. _He recognizes her._

"Alex, this is General Jack O'Neill. Sir, this is Alex Tyler."

She walks right over to him and holds out her hand. "Do you work with Cam?" she asks.

O'Neill takes it and shakes it. "Actually, I'm kind of his boss."

"Ooops," Alex says. She glances back at him, and Cam can see that she's worried that he might be in trouble.

"You go on tell Momma it's for me, baby," he says.

"Pleased to meet you, sir," Alex says to O'Neill. She favors them both with a dazzling smile and runs off across the lawn, bare legs flashing in the twilight.

O'Neill watches her go with an expression on his face Cam can't decipher, and Cam's waiting for he doesn't know what. Ten years ago O'Neill told him to take care of Jackson, and the Good Lord knows Cam's tried. He doesn't know if this counts, because Jackson's gone now in every way that matters, and the woman O'Neill loves isn't the woman he's married to, and Cam was never able to marry the woman he loved, because he couldn't bring her home.

"They're looking for her," O'Neill says neutrally.

"Haven't come here," Cam says.

O'Neill inspects the sky as if it contains something of interest. "Apparently she resigned. There was a letter in her desk at the SGC."

"So she's gone?" They're fencing, even though they're on the same side. At least Cam hopes to God they are.

"You know better than that, Mitchell. They're going to want to debrief her. At least."

"They wanted her at the UN," Cam says, and he tries not to make it sound like an accusation.

O'Neill sighs and Cam thinks he isn't going to get an explanation, but he's seen O'Neill furious and terrified and everything in between and this isn't any of that. He's not sure what it is, but he knows one thing: Jackson vanished and O'Neill came here because O'Neill knows the one thing nobody else does: that Jackson is Cam's to take care of. _Was,_ because she doesn't exist any more. There's just Alex.

"The public face of the Stargate Program," O'Neill says at last, and in his voice Cam can hear all the bitterness of battles fought and lost.

Cam doesn't think there would have been anything he could have done to hold Jackson together through that. Worse, nothing he would have been _able_ (allowed and permitted and given the privacy and access) to do, because she would have been _living in a fucking goldfish bowl._ "Are they aware, _sir,_ of the fact that none of them would be alive today if it hadn't been for what Dr. Jackson did?" he finally says, and he knows he's just this side of insolent and sounds as if he's spitting nails.

"Oh, of course they are, Mitchell. That's why they wanted her," O'Neill answers, and the sarcasm in his voice is vicious. They're both speaking of her in the past tense.

Alex comes running back across the lawn and skids to a stop at a polite distance. Bearing a message from Momma, obviously, but not going to butt in on their conversation.

"The new glasses were a nice touch," O'Neill says, voice pitched low.

"None of the old ones worked any more," Cam answers.

He'd known enough to bring her oldest pair of glasses (because Jackson never threw anything out) but even so, they'd been the wrong prescription; she'd needed glasses at twentysomething, but her eyes hadn't been nearly as bad as they'd gotten later. So they'd tossed them at one of the stops, and gotten her a new pair at one of those same-day mall places. He beckons Alex over. She comes, slips an arm around his waist, leans on him as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. It is. Of course it is. Her world is only two weeks deep.

"Momma wants to know would the General care to stay to dessert? And she'll whip your ass if you haven't already invited him," she adds in an undertone meant for Cam's ears alone, though he's pretty sure O'Neill hears her. "And to stay the night."

"Sir?" Cam asks. There's nothing else he can do.

#

The General accepts the offer of peach cobbler, declines the offer of a bed, saying he has to be on his way in time to catch a late flight. Over dessert he draws Alex out, and it's too damned easy, and all Cam can do is watch helplessly. She keeps the fact that she doesn't remember anything of her past fairly well covered up, but it's there if you know what to look for. All she knows about herself is what Cam's told her, and that's a mixture of carefully-edited facts and outright lies.

She's twenty-two. An only child. Born in Alexandria, Virginia, and named for the place she was born. Her parents are dead. She and Cam are very good friends. Cam's home on leave, and she'll be staying here when he goes back to his posting.

Cam keeps thinking O'Neill's going to draw her into questions he hasn't had time to come up with good answers for - _schooling, future, where did you meet Cam_ \- but he doesn't. So O'Neill gets to hear about the garden, and her knitting projects, and probably more than he really wants to about a local zoning fight. It seems to fascinate him. When it's time for O'Neill to leave, Cam walks him to his car alone. They stop at the front fender. Something's coming. Cam can feel it.

"I always wondered what she would have been like," O'Neill finally says. Cam doesn't answer. O'Neill's speaking aloud, but it's not the kind of remark you answer. "Don't let anyone DNA test her," he says, and this time he's speaking to Cam.

"Yes, sir," Cam says, wondering just how in the hell he's supposed to stop them. If they show up here.

"For a few weeks," O'Neill says. "After that it won't matter." He smiles, and Cam thinks that anybody who doesn't think that O'Neill is still a dangerous man is a fool. Jackson's standard is stored in two places: the SGC and AFDIL, same as his. Fingerprints scanned into a few databases. Cam's thinking all of that is about to stop matching Alex Tyler. Somehow.

"It was my idea, sir," he says.

That gets him a variation on the same _the world is full of idiots_ expression he's never going to see again on a more familiar face. "I know whose idea it was. I know you chose the best available option. You always did. Goodnight, Mitchell." O'Neill walks around to the car door, climbs in, drives away.

"Godspeed," Cam says.

#

A few days later Cam realizes he's got ... trouble. Okay, more trouble than he thought he had, which was enough. The trouble he thought he had was that Alex really doesn't understand why he won't sleep with her (what she actually wants him to do is _fuck_ her, but Alex Tyler doesn't use that kind of language), especially since the first thing she remembers is waking up naked in what she still thinks was his bed. And Cam is running out of polite evasions. Bad enough he had to tell Momma and Daddy that he couldn't tell them why General O'Neill came all this way to eat dessert with the family and then turn right around and leave again, because they know damned well General O'Neill's based out of Washington, or he was; they saw him there when they were visiting Cam after Antarctica. Worse, because he's already brought home an interesting stray who can't remember a damned thing and asked them to take her in, and they can see plain as day that she's what General O'Neill came to see. And Alex follows him around like an adoring puppy, and he misses Jackson so much some days that he can't _breathe._

He's out in the side yard, under one of the trucks, working on it. Alex is there to hand him tools. Of course she is. And Cam could tell her to run along and find something else to do, but it would be like kicking a puppy. He'll be gone in a week, anyway. Back at the Mountain just about in time for the fireworks.

"You're married, aren't you?" Alex asks, prodding his ankle with a finger. "To that Danielle Jackson? Cam, you ought to just _say;_ I mean, Mo- _everybody's_ wondering why you never bring-"

"Where the _hell_ did you hear that name?" Cam slides out from under the truck so fast he bangs his head on the underside of the fender. Alex scoots back out of the way, loses her balance, and sits down fast.

"Skipper told me that Spencer told him that he'd heard from-"

The genealogy of the explanation is long and convoluted - Cam actually follows it easily - and it traces back to a lieutenant in Offworld Section (to whom Cam is related at about eight removes) who has a big mouth. Not about anything classified. Just about who Colonel Cameron Mitchell is dating. Has been dating for quite a long time. Because some things are actually secrets, and other things are just things nobody talks about. And one of the things in Category Number Two is apparently Cameron Mitchell's common-law wife.

He is so screwed. At least - thanks to Alex (who has never entertained the notion of keeping a secret _in her entire life,_ such as it is, and O'Neill's words keep coming back to haunt him _"I always wondered what she would have been like"_ and he'd known Jackson longer than any of them, back to that first trip through the Stargate, back when she'd still been _Dani,_ not Jackson, and Cam knows nevertheless that she'd been scarred even then) - he knows he's going to be walking into a hooraw's nest when he goes back. Jackson gone, and his relationship to her nothing even close to a secret. They'll want to know if he knows where she is. If they think she's missing, they've already searched her apartment. Which means they've probably dug deep enough to search the one next door. So they've found what they'll think of as Jackson's "dirty little secrets." Nothing's in his name, there's no paper-trail leading back to Colonel Mitchell, and there's not one scrap of anything in her personal apartment or his. But his fingerprints are all over the playroom, and he didn't bother to strip her bed before they left. He'd like to think he isn't walking back into something rougher than a grilling about the whereabouts of his missing girlfriend. He'll hope he isn't.

But if he is, if he's brought up on charges (god knows what they'd be), O'Neill will know. It's the only hope Cam's got to hold on to in the event of disaster. O'Neill will know, and he knows where Alex is. He'll get her out and make her disappear, and even Cam won't know where she is.

He's never been so glad that Teal'c's gone and not likely to be coming back to Earth any time soon, because he couldn't lie to Teal'c, and he's not sure what Teal'c would do if he told him the truth. He's not sure what _Sam's_ going to do, but he owes her at least some of the truth: that he knows where Jackson is, and that she's safe.

It's almost the truth.

"I am not married," he says, rubbing his forehead.

"Skipper said that-" she says, obviously prepared to work through the entire chain again in support of her next question.

"Don't you listen to anything Skipper says," Cam says. "Or Spencer says. Or anybody says."

"What about you?" she asks, and Cam sighs.

"Okay," he says. "You can listen to me. Hey, come on. I know. Why don't we go for a ride? I'll buy you ice cream."

She rolls her eyes. "I am not twelve. I'm twenty-two. I think." There's a pause. "How would I know?"

"You're twenty-two," Cam says. "C'mon. We'll tell Momma we're going."

#

Freedom is purchased with duty; Cam is told off to stop at the farm stand to see what looks good. They stop at the Dairy Queen (Alex gets something different every time; she's trying to figure out what she used to like; Cam can't bear to tell her she _never_ went to a DQ in all the time he knew her ... before) and then head up the road toward his favorite farm stand.

"I think I like chocolate better than vanilla," she says meditatively.

"Do you?" Cam asks. Jackson did.

"You said you knew me," she says accusingly.

"Don't want to make up your mind for you."

"I don't _have_ a mind," she points out. Pouting at him. But the storm is brief. He's learned that about Alex by now. She's all sunshine and showers.

They pull up at the farm stand. Cam gets down to serious shopping. Alex wanders (as usual), inspecting everything as if she's going to be called upon to write _A History of Fruit in the South._ A few minutes later Cam looks up, his attention caught by voices talking in an unfamiliar language.

One of the speakers is Mrs. Ngo. She and her husband are a nice Vietnamese couple who moved into the county a couple of years ago - to farm, of all things. She's a sweet lady, but her English isn't the best. And oh dear Lord. The other party to the conversation is Alex. She's smiling and chattering away and Mrs. Ngo is smiling and chattering away and _Alex is speaking Vietnamese._ Alex doesn't speak Vietnamese. _Jackson_ speaks Vietnamese. And maybe 200 other languages.

Cam doesn't panic, because it won't do any good. He buys fruit, and Mrs. Ngo leaves, and whoever-she-is-now comes wandering over and leans against him and looks up. "Aren't you done yet?" she asks. And she sounds like Alex. In the last two-and-a-bit weeks Alex has picked up the same soft drawl everybody down Black Mountain way talks with. Cam wouldn't even notice, except for the fact that he's spent years eradicating it from his own speech. Except for the fact that Jackson never had it. Jackson had no particular accent at all, though she could put on about as many of them as she knew languages. Part and parcel, she'd told him once, of the fact that there was more to speaking a language than just saying the words.

He doesn't think Alex is putting anything on.

"Didn't know you spoke Vietnamese," he says calmly. Because he's dealt with worse than this.

"Oh." She wrinkles her nose, surprised. "I... guess I do. Well, um-" she gestures back in the direction of the cash register and scales "-she was having trouble. So I helped her out."

#

He doesn't know anywhere near the languages that Jackson did. He's got scraps of a few, and on the ride home he tries them out on Alex. She can answer him back in all of them. Including _Goa'uld_. Jackson was fluent in _Goa'uld_. Nobody on Earth outside the SGC has ever heard it.

"Cam? Is everything okay?"

"Sure it is, baby. Everything's fine." What else is locked up in Alex's skull, waiting for something to call it out?

#

She can tell he's distracted. She also knows that he's leaving in another week, and she doesn't want him to go. He's been the only constant in her life, and he knows she's convinced she's in love with him. He does his best not to resent it. It isn't _her_ fault she isn't Jackson. Alex is as innocent as a butterfly.

When they get back to the house and bring the fruit into the kitchen (baskets of peaches, flats of raspberries and blackberries, enough cherries for a pie or two if he can keep them out of Alex's hands long enough) he doesn't but get the first load set down on the counter before Momma skewers him with a look Cam's come to fear and lets him know that Daddy wants to see him when he's got a free moment.

And Cam loves his Daddy dearly, but no good ever comes of a conversation in the Mitchell household that Momma delegates to Daddy. Because Momma lays down the law with thunder and lightning and sometimes a body is moved to take his life in his hands and argue back. And Daddy just makes quiet suggestions. And nobody ever argues at all. But all there is to say is "Yes'm," while Alex says that she can bring in the rest of the fruit out of the car, so there's nothing for Cam to do but go off down the hall right now.

Uncle Roy and Uncle Bayliss are down in the den with Daddy, the way they almost always are, and when Cam knocks on the door and opens it, both of them get to their feet with errands. Cam comes in and sits down. He and Daddy talk about the weather for a little, and the prospects of the local teams.

"Going to be heading out soon," Daddy says.

"Yes sir," Cam says. "Leave's almost up."

"Won't be back for a while," Daddy says.

"Christmas, I hope," Cam says. It's five months away. And no guarantee, especially with the Program going public.

"Now Cameron, you know that your Momma and I have never pried into your business," Daddy says. "Or the US Government's business. That's not our way. And if you bring home a young lady and say that she needs a place to be for a while, that's well and good. Plenty of room. We wouldn't turn away a friend of yours, you know that."

"Yes, sir," Cam says. "I do know that." He's got an idea where this is going, now, and it doesn't make him happy at all.

"But son, think for a moment. You might not be coming back. If you don't come back, just where does that leave Alex?"

Cam shakes his head. He's always known something could happen to him. Something could happen to any of them. "I-" He doesn't know what to say. What he _can_ say.

Daddy watches his face for a moment. "Don't you think it would be a good idea to write out a letter? If you don't want to write one to her, best you write one to Momma, so she'll know what to say. Don't think you'll need it, mind. But it's always best to be safe."

"Yes, sir," Cam says dutifully. He gets to his feet and hugs his father and thinks that while there's a lot of things he's never told his parents, this is the first time he's contemplated telling either of them a flat-out _lie._

#

Skipper is fluent in both Russian and Arabic. He's never spoken either to Alex because it's rude to talk to somebody in a language they don't speak, but after dinner, Cam corrals the two of them and takes them out onto the Pocket Porch and makes Skipper ask Alex something - anything - in Russian. (The Russians have had a sixteen-man contingent at the SGC for years whose command of English vanishes at convenient moments; Cam has a few basic phrases, Jackson is scatologically fluent.) Skipper's doubtful, but in a few minutes he and Alex are chattering away in Russian. Cam knows just enough to recognize the local equivalent of _'hey, I didn't know you spoke Russian,'_ when it goes flying by.

She stops and looks up at Cam hopefully. "Maybe my memory's coming back."

"Maybe," he says. Christ, he hopes not.

But the Dargol was supposed to _scrub her brain._ Take everything back to Square One. She shouldn't remember Russian and Chinese and French and German and Vietnamese and she sure as _hell_ shouldn't remember _Goa'uld_. There's no way for him to ask anyone about that either without maybe tipping his hand a lot farther than he'd like.

He can't check out whether Alex remembers the other stuff Jackson knew either. Even if he had time, the only person he trusts is out of the country. Summer is dig season, and Uncle Alvin is off terrorizing his grad students somewhere overseas. It hurts, suddenly, that Cam will never be able to introduce Jackson to Uncle Alvin. She would have been able - finally - to tell him the actual genesis of the civilizations he'd studied all his life. He'd have loved that.

He makes an early night of it. He's got a letter to write. Or _not_ write, when it comes down to it. As he pretty much expects, it isn't long before Alex comes along. She walks in and sits down on his bed. Dressed for seduction in a _Garfield_ sleepshirt. He turns his back with ostentatious rudeness and pretends he's actually writing his letter. He's been staring at the page for half an hour. It's still blank.

"Cameron...?"

"No."

"You don't even know what I'm going to ask."

"Same thing you always ask this time of day. Answer's still 'no.'"

"Why not?"

"That is not a question a lady asks a gentleman."

"Okay, so what was I doing naked in your bed if you're just going to 'no' me to death?"

"Alex, this is my parents' house." Which has precisely nothing to do with anything at all - though the fact that "Alex Tyler" is less than half Cam's age would garner him one of Momma's most particular looks.

"What about all those motels?"

Three days on the road, same room, separate beds, and she'd been puzzled and scared by not remembering anything and half the time he'd wake up in the middle of the night because she'd be climbing in with him, and he hadn't had the heart to send her back to her own bed, but it hadn't meant he wanted _Alex,_ either.

"Yeah, okay, I wanted to spare you this, but I'm gay."

She dismisses that statement with a rude snort. "Cameron?"

"Yeah?" He really wishes she would just _get the hell out of his bedroom_ and leave him to ... not write this letter.

"If I do it with somebody else first, will you sleep with me?"

She sounds so forlorn. He sighs, stands up, turns around. "It won't make a difference," he says gently. "So you shouldn't do that with anyone you don't love. I'm never going to sleep with you. It's nothing to do with you."

She takes a deep breath, on the edge of tears. "It is!" she says shakily. "It's because I can't remember, I know it is. Cam, who was I? What did I _do?_ "

He takes her by the shoulders and pulls her to her feet. Kisses her on the forehead. "You're Alex Tyler. You never did anything bad in your life. Ever. And you're going to go to bed now and dream sweet dreams."

He walks her to his bedroom door - shoving just a little - and through it, and closes it. And he leans against it, closing his eyes, thinking that there has to be a special Hell for Air Force Colonels who lie to innocent young girls who are (by some other definition of reality) neither innocent or young.

#

He doesn't get any sleep that night, but he gets a completely useless letter written. One that he hopes Momma never actually opens, because if she does, there is a good chance that she will _bring him back from the dead_ in order to kill him slowly.

_'Dear Momma and Daddy: I know we talked about me putting all sorts of important things into this letter, and I am sorrier than you will ever know to disappoint you by going against your wishes and not doing what you asked me to. But I can't. You have to believe that if I could, I would. I would trust either one of you with anything that's mine to give. But some things aren't. And I cannot explain. I only hope you will forgive me someday. Your loving son, Cameron'_

He fills out the envelope with several extra sheets of paper and tapes it so thoroughly and completely shut that anybody who opens it will have to work at the job, and the envelope will be in ruins afterward. When he's finished doing that, he packs. He's got a bit more than a week's leave left, but he's thinking it won't do any harm at all to get back early. And maybe a lot of good.

When he's done, he hesitates for a long time, then digs through his wallet until he finds a phone number written on the back of an ancient business card for a restaurant that's long-since gone out of business. He copies it down onto another sheet of paper and stuffs it into his pocket. Then he takes the letter and heads downstairs.

There's a little Side Parlor off the Piano Room. Not big enough to be much use. Technically it's Momma's office, though Momma pays the bills from the kitchen table, and has ever since Cam can remember. What it really is, is Momma's "Leave Me Alone" Room, but it also holds the file cabinet with the family Death Letters: all the _In Case Of_ letters that Clan Mitchell has written and given her to hold. Cam has one there. So does Ashton. Anybody who thinks they might have something to say to the living beyond the bounds of wills and Letters of Intent is welcome to leave one, but of course, most of them are left by the serving military members of the family. Those who are likelier than others to see one Christmas but not the next. Cam figures his most strategic course of action is to slip this letter in next to his other one, and the phone number with it. At 4:30 in the morning, he shouldn't be trespassing.

And the room is dark. But the moment he sets one foot over the threshold, he knows it isn't empty.

"Might as well come on in, Cameron," Momma says out of the dark. A moment later he hears the creak of her rocker. He steps in and closes the door. "Come to leave a letter, have you?"

"Yes'm," Cam says. "Momma, is ever'thing all right?"

"Old bones. And I think by rights I should be asking you that question. Ever' time you look at that child, you look like the yellow dog just died. And she spent two hours crying herself to sleep last night." There's a click, and the ruby-glass lamp on the side-table comes on low. "You're going to need light to see by."

It's barely enough light to make out the shapes of the furniture, but Cam has come to this room ever since he can remember, watching Momma take letters out of the file. He finds his own folder and tucks the papers into it, closes the drawer again. "Momma, I'm leaving today. I need to go back."

"Come sit."

There's a footstool beside the rocker. Its upholstery is as bright as the rocker's is worn; she never uses it. Cam pulls it up beside her and sits down. His mother reaches out and takes his chin in her fingers, inspecting his face critically. "In trouble?" she asks.

"Might be, Momma."

"Do something wrong?"

"No, Momma." Of that he is certain. He's done nothing wrong.

She pats his cheek. "Anything you want to tell me?" she asks, and Cam laughs.

"More'n you can imagine. And I can't."

"Hmph." Momma rocks meditatively.

"Two things, though," Cam says, after a while. "There's some money in a bag in my room. It's Alex's. There isn't anything at all underhanded about it. It belongs to her fair and square."

"And if I asked her was it hers, she'd say she'd never seen it before in her life," Momma says.

"I'm sorry," Cam says, because he is.

"And the other thing?" Momma asks, after a long pause.

"If something ever happens to Alex, there's a number in with my letter. You call that number, no matter when. You tell them what's happened to Alex Tyler. Only one person's going to answer that phone."

"I think somebody's been watching too damned many spy movies."

"Momma, I'm sorry. If I thought something was really going to happen, I would never have brought her here."

Momma reaches out and ruffles his hair. "'Course you would. You've been bringing me your problems since they were frogs from the crick down back, I don't expect you'd change now. We'll take care of her. You just go and do what you've got to do."

#

It doesn't seem either fair or right to sneak out without saying 'goodbye' to everyone - most of all to Alex, and he knows she'll think he's deserting her, and he knows she'll be terrified - so even though Cam loads up the car as soon as there's enough light to see by, he stays to breakfast and tells everybody then that he's leaving ahead of schedule. Momma already knows, of course, and she's already told Daddy.

"Today?" Alex says, and every thing she's thinking is plain to read on her face. That she thought they'd have more time together. That this was a fine place to be as long as he was here, but that she doesn't think she's going to like it once he's gone. That he's deserting her and leaving her alone among strangers, and _how can he do that?_ "When?"

"Right after breakfast," Cam says, and he keeps his voice calm and matter-of-fact (as he's kept it under fire, surrounded by hostiles, facing torture, all through a life and a history that up until almost three weeks ago she'd shared and he tries not to think that she deserted him first, because he's the one who let her do it. Helped her. Made the final decision.)

"Excuse me. I don't think I'm very hungry," Alex says.

"Take your plate into the kitchen if you're finished eating," Momma says calmly.

#

Cam doesn't see her again before he leaves. He doesn't look for her either. It's kinder that way. If he gets through the next two weeks alive (home, reporting in, the inevitable changes to Command that will follow the series of meetings at the UN) he'll write home - or call - and see how things are going. She's Alex Tyler now. She'll need to learn to live without him.

He needs to learn to live without Jackson.

#

He phones Sam from a pull-off a few hours up the road. He's made great play, down through the years, out of not knowing things even when he did. He's certain _(utterly certain)_ that nobody knows about O'Neill's visit, so he doesn't need to admit to knowing any of the things O'Neill told him. He keeps firmly in the front of his mind that Sam is TDY to the SGC, because she was going to be coming in to play back-up singer to Jackson at the UN, that he's calling her, friend to friend, because he's coming back from leave early, and friends give friends a heads-up on the lay of the land.

"Is she with you?" is the first thing Sam says once she knows it's him.

He lets a beat of silence pass, forces incredulity into his voice. "Jackson? Sam, I've been _home._ " He's _never_ taken Jackson home to meet his family, and Sam knows that perfectly well. There've even been a few Christmases in the past decade when he and Sam were both there, and Jackson was back in the Springs, and he knew why, and Sam knew why, and the two of them just pussyfooted around Momma and everyone in the Family who thought it was high time he and Sam settled down.

"When was the last time you saw her?" Sam demands.

"The night I left. Sam?" He stops there. In lies as in poker, the trick is to underplay.

"She's been missing for almost three weeks, Cam."

He takes a deep breath. Ten years ago his next move would have been to start yelling about why he - her team leader - hadn't been called first thing. But there haven't been old-style Gate Teams in a decade, just a pool of Offworld Qualified Personnel from which Gate Teams are assembled on a mission-by-mission basis. The fact that Jackson rarely went out with any other commander than Cam was politely ascribed, by one and all, to coincidence. But due to that reorganization, Cam is not - technically - in her direct Chain of Command. Landry would have been notified when she went missing. Not Cam.

"You couldn't have called me?" he says, and lets all his anger - at this entire no-win situation - bleed into his voice.

"I was trying to keep you out of it! In case-"

"In case what? She and I had decided to flee the country together?"

"Yes! Cam, they searched her apartment. They found ... things."

He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes. Just as glad, right now, that he decided to have this little talk in a stationary vehicle. "What kind of things?"

"False ID. Extra passports in fake names."

"Do you know everything they found?"

"Why?" her voice is suspicious now.

"Because apparently it is common knowledge around the SGC that Jackson and I have been having an affair for years, and now she's missing, so I'd really like to know what kind of questions they're going to be asking me when I back get there, Sam."

There's a kind of embarrassed silence at the other end. Too many years since they've served together. Too many years since they've been really close. But they're both SG-1, so in another way, they'll always be close enough for this, no matter what. "Oh. Okay. Hang on. I've got the NID's preliminary report on my laptop."

He doesn't ask where she got it; he's pretty sure she isn't supposed to have it. He hears the clickety of keys for a few seconds, then her voice again.

"A lot of drugs - all from the SGC dispensary, all prescribed - a number of firearms - a number of artifacts - they've all been brought in to C&T to determine which ones, if any, are of offworld origin - a large amount of cash. A set of keys to the apartment next door, which was purchased under the name 'Harriett Mayborne-'" Sam pauses to snort editorially, but Cam's never gotten that joke "- and which was completely empty. No, wait. They said there was a chair in it."

"A chair," he says, and it isn't any effort to sound stunned, because he knows exactly what was in that apartment the day he left, and unless the NID is falsifying its own reports now, it all vanished sometime in the next two weeks.

"A red velvet wingback chair and footstool," Sam says. "Cam-"

"I have not seen Jackson since the day I left," Cam says. "Swear to God, Sam." He hesitates, and asks the question that's the next logical question. "General O'Neill?"

"When she didn't show up for work on Monday - didn't call - didn't answer her pager - General Landry sent a security team to her apartment. When they went in and it was empty, they put out an alert. Homeworld was notified. When they searched her desk at the SGC - and found the letter - she left a resignation letter - that was Tuesday - General O'Neill flew out. He searched her apartment himself - hell, Cam, he searched _your_ apartment. And then the NID finally showed up, and ... I'm sorry. I think they probably searched your place again."

"Nothing to hide," Cam says. Even if he did have, he doesn't think it would still have been there after O'Neill's visit.

"Cam-" she says. He can hear the hurt and the fear in her voice. "Dani's missing. And I know - _you_ know - she didn't want to do this. She wanted to ... run. Didn't she?"

"Yeah," Cam says, because the basis of a good lie is the truth, and the questions Sam's asking are the ones other people are going to ask him. Over and over.

"But what if she didn't?" Sam says. "What if she was kidnapped? Oh, god, Cam, there are still a couple of _Goa'uld_ out there. She'll be on their Top Ten list until she dies. We've never been sure Ba'al was dead. What if he's taken her?"

"Sam-" he says. And he wants to tell her the truth. Or enough of the truth to keep her from nightmares like these. But _not over an open line._ "If the _Goa'uld_ haven't grabbed her in ten years, they probably didn't grab her this year. And most people don't leave a letter of resignation before they're kidnapped."

"Cam, Dani used to resign _twice a year_ for as long as I knew her. That could have been any of her letters," Sam says. Angry. Exasperated. Cam blows out a long breath.

"I know. I'll be there as fast as I can. I'll call you again when I stop for the night."

He hears Sam laugh. It's nothing like a happy sound. "Oh, call any time. I don't think I'm going to get much sleep."

#

He's driving up the road, thinking he's going to have to stop in a few hours because of not having gotten any sleep last night, but after that, he ought to be able to pull eighteen-hour days flying low and get back to the Springs in two days tops. And he thinks he owes O'Neill one hell of a lot (has to have been O'Neill) for making the playroom go away. Nobody would have understood about what it meant to him and Jackson. What they used it for. That it meant love and care - from him to Jackson, from her to him. All outsiders would have seen was nastiness and perversion. People tying each other up. People hitting each other with whips. He won't let anyone make him ashamed of what he did with Jackson, for her, what they did for each other. And he is grateful beyond words that it can stay theirs, and not be dragged out and pawed over by people who would never understand. Not just because they don't have those same kinds of needs and desires. But because they've never gone through the Gate. Never faced the _Goa'uld_. Never faced the Ori.

And for a while Cam wonders why, if O'Neill got rid of so much, he didn't make the rest disappear too: the extra passports and the extra stashes of cash (Cam knew he hadn't gotten it all; he just went for the biggest one) and all the handguns and all those bottles of pills (not her damned fault the Infirmary kept sending them home with her), but after a while, he figures it out. Best to leave them something to find. They didn't much like Jackson at the IOC or the NID, and finding her squeaky-clean would just make them even more suspicious than they already are. Let them think she's cut and run. She doesn't give a damn about her public reputation. The people who's lives she's saved won't believe anything the NID has to say about her, and if they will, they're nobody Cam wants to call a friend. She wasn't a criminal. She just didn't want to spend the rest of her life - such as it would have been - in the public spotlight playing politics and being raked over the coals for twenty years of decisions made fighting a secret war. And goddammit, she'd earned the right to walk away and not have to.

He turns the radio up high and runs along on the music for a while. Pulls over around noon at a roadside picnic table. Doesn't matter where a Mitchell's headed, Momma packs food for the journey. There's a good big thermos of sweet tea too. He swats sugarbees away from the cup while he eats his way through a couple of sandwiches and a serving of potato salad and a slice of pie. There's more in the cooler, enough that he doesn't need to worry about dinner. Gets back on the road and manages to get in another four hours before he starts to get the feeling it's time to look for a place to stop. He finds one another half hour up the road. A shower wakes him up enough to place another call to Sam.

"This is Cameron Mitchell signing off," he says, when she answers.

"Hi," she says. "What?"

"Going to bed," he says. "Been up more'n twenty-four hours. Sleep now, hit the road early, drive like hell. How're things at your end?"

"No change," Sam says. "Cam ... if she had a plan, why wouldn't she tell you what it was? I mean, I know why she might not tell me..."

"Baby, she wouldn't tell either one of us for the exact same reason," Cam says quietly. "Either we'd have to stop her, or - afterward - we'd have to tell if we were asked." _Or lie. Or break my oath._

"I'd like to think she cared that much," Sam says bitterly.

"She did," Cam says. Jackson cared enough not to come up with any plan involving the two of them - him and her - disappearing together. She didn't ask him to make that choice.

#

He wakes up about midnight, finishes off the contents of the cooler, and hits the road again. Nobody much on the road in the small hours, and after twelve years of going through the Gate, he's pretty good at turning midnight and noon around at a moment's notice. Eight o'clock that night is twenty hours on the road; he finds another motel. Sam has his number now. If there's trouble, she'll call.

At three he's up and rolling again. It's almost midnight when he hits the Springs (damned good time door to door, even considering he didn't drop much below 90 the whole time) and good little Colonels should head straight for their own beds, but he's never been that. Where he goes is Jackson's loft. There aren't any warn-away signs on the outside door, so he goes in. Checks her mail (nothing there) and goes on up (threw out the keys for the other apartment along the verge along the way because he thought it'd be just as well if he didn't have them on his keyring when he and his keyring show up back here.) Unlocks her apartment door. And when he sees what's beyond the door he wishes, for just a minute, that he hadn't come, because the place has been pretty thoroughly trashed. Books yanked off the shelves and tossed on the floor. One of her African masks is on the floor, broken. Somebody stepped on it. He picks it up, meaning to put it on the table, but it comes to pieces in his hands.

He walks through the apartment, slowly. Tablecloth and pad are off the dining room table. The white damask cloth is puddled on the floor; there's a black footprint in the middle of it. He bends down, picks up the pad, puts it back on the table, picks up the tablecloth, shakes it out, puts it back over the table so the footprint doesn't show. This isn't as much a case of a search as a vandalism. And hell. There's no damned point in calling the police, is there? Considering this was done by a branch of the Federal Government.

The kitchen is a nightmare. The rest of her good china dishes have been broken. The refrigerator door is hanging open, half the food from the freezer scooped out onto the floor, and the smell of spoiled food is pervasive. Flour, sugar, honey, are spilled and mingled on the floor; other dry goods have been dumped into the sink, and the faucet is dripping heavily, ruining everything. He edges around the mess on the floor to close the refrigerator. He'll deal with the rest of it another time.

In the bedroom, the sheets have been stripped from the bed and he doesn't see them anywhere. The dresser drawers have been yanked out and overturned, their contents dumped on the floor, the drawers piled in a corner. The closet has been emptied as well, and in the same way. Clothes everywhere. In the bathroom, every jar, every bottle, has been opened and upended into the bathtub. Oil and shampoo and lotion and cream and bath-salts form an alluvial sludge heading for the drain. Every single pill bottle of any kind is gone from the bathroom cabinet.

Somehow this is proof that Jackson was right to do what she did. Cam's not sure why he thinks that - maybe he's just too tired right now to be thinking straight. What he knows for sure is that he's too tired to face the sight of his own place in this condition, because if he sees it like this, he wants to be awake enough to go shoot somebody and not miss.

The pillows still have their cases. He collects them from the floor, finds a couple of blankets, makes himself a bed on the mattress, and sleeps.

#

He wakes up around noon, and for just an instant - familiar mattress, familiar light - he thinks that everything's all right. He can roll over, and put his hand on her, and the last few weeks will have been nothing more than a bad dream. Not over. Never happened.

Then he wakes up all the way and knows it isn't true.

He sits up, groaning a bit. Stiff from so many hours in the driver's seat, and in a sane world, he'd just step into the shower, because he'd been next-to living here for years and kept everything he needed here. Now he knows if he wants anything from a toothbrush to clean underwear to a cup of coffee, he'll need to go home for it, and God help the NID if he can even _suspect_ they've crossed his doorstep, because he's getting the Mossburg down from over the fireplace and going up to the Mountain and finding whichever NID fella's there (because he knows somebody is) and explaining why that's a bad thing to do.

When he went to sleep, in the back of his mind he had the notion of cleaning up Jackson's place, but now he doesn't think he can really bear to. It isn't someplace he belongs anymore, it'd be like intruding, and a part of him wonders how a couple of weeks can make such a difference. But it's not just the time. It's the absence that's worse than a death, because a death is final and clean _(not with Jackson)_ and it would hurt just as much, but maybe it wouldn't seem quite as terrible.

He puts on his shoes, gets his coat, walks out. He tries not to look, tries not to see, but in the morning light, the wreckage of the apartment looks even worse than it did last night. They didn't know she wasn't coming back _(isn't ever coming back)_ when they did this to her. They just knew she couldn't defend herself. And knowing that starts a dull slow anger building that he knows he ought to get his hands into and face down and stamp out before it kindles into a burning that won't go out.

And he doesn't.

Cam doesn't lock the door to Jackson's place when he leaves. He sets the deadbolt so the snaplock won't shut, either. If the NID comes back and finds the place cleaned out to the walls, let 'em wonder. He drives back to his place. Some years gone he bought a nice two-bedroom condominium with easy access to the Mountain - meaning a forty-minute straight shot (if he obeys the speed limits), and all the roads between his garage and the access road up the Mountain are priority-plowed. He pulls into his garage (one of the reasons he bought this particular place, after five years of shoveling off his Mustang every winter) then slips his gun out of its holster and goes in the side door.

Kitchen's clear. Cabinets are okay, and fridge hasn't been touched that he can see. He works his way across the living room - a few things have been moved, the pillows on the couch are out of order, the afghan's been refolded and moved from the sofa to the chair - clearing each room before moving on to the next.

People have been in his apartment all right. But they haven't made a mess. He checks the bedroom and the bathrooms (full bath, half bath) thoroughly before heading back to the second bedroom. It's set up mostly as a gameroom and den, but it's where he keeps his files. He goes through them thoroughly, and he isn't the first person who has in the last while. Everything's here, and there wasn't one thing here that the world couldn't see. Anything either precious or sensitive was in a lockbox in the playroom. So it's all gone.

And he knows he isn't seeing traces of O'Neill's visit, because if it had been O'Neill, there'd be nothing to see. He goes around and checks all the doors and windows one more time, making sure they're locked, then puts his gun in his nightstand drawer and goes to take a shower.

Clean clothes and coffee on, he finally goes down and unloads the car, then comes back in, sponges the cooler out and sets it to air, loads the dishwasher and sets it to running, pokes around his cupboards to see what he can do about breakfast. Nothing perishable in the icebox, since he cleaned it out before his trip home (and he thinks about the two bags of microwaveable freezer meals in Zip-Loc boxes he took over to Jackson's that last night, and thinks about the fact that the last time he saw them was scattered around her counters and tossed around her floor, and leans against his kitchen sink, staring out the window at nothing and breathing carefully.) Just as well he didn't come home last night. He's inclined to think things over a little more carefully in the cold light of day.

Then he gets the emergency loaf of bread out of the freezer and makes toast to go with his coffee (canned cow, and he needs to make a grocery run in a little), and slathers jam on his toast (Momma sent home a Care Package), and checks his messages. Mostly junk. One from Sam, saying she's in the Springs and to call her before he does anything else - _anything._ That's taken care of. One from General Landry, telling him to phone the Duty Desk as soon as he arrives. He'll let that age a while; he's still got several days of leave yet. One from a voice he doesn't recognize - no name - telling him to call a local number he also doesn't recognize on a matter of National Security. He wipes his machine's memory and digs out his cellphone to call Sam when a thought strikes him.

He was careful and meticulous by profession (there were two kinds of pilots: careful and dead, and Cam didn't make it all the way to 'dead', not quite); the SGC taught him to be cautious (almost cautious enough); Jackson was _paranoid._ She taught him how to be, but it never really came naturally. He knows all the steps in the dance, though, and it might be time to start. When he picks up his phone and inspects it carefully, taking the bits apart that come apart easily, he finds the first bug. He leaves it right there - Jackson said that the very last thing you do is remove them, and you think carefully first - and searches his apartment, looking in all the places she said were the commonest places to put them. After he finds the sixth one, he armors up again and turns off his coffeemaker and gets in his car and drives to the mall and parks. Sam answers her phone on the third ring.

"Hey, Sam," he says, and his voice is soft and easy, and he leans back in the seat and smiles, and he's been Colonel Mitchell for a decade now, but anybody who'd known Lieutenant Mitchell, Captain Mitchell, even Major Mitchell would be getting ready to duck and cover. "How you doin'?"

"Where are you?" she asks.

"Hey," he says. "You remember that diner we all used to like to go to breakfast at? The twenty-four hour place? Why'nt you meet me there?"

"Um, sure, but-"

He closes his phone before she can get any further. That diner's been gone for years. It's a bank now. He's waiting there when she drives up. Not her car, of course. It's a Motor Pool car. She gets out. He gets out. Finger to his lips. He beckons her over to his car and opens the door for her. She gets in, frowning. He walks around to the driver's side, climbs in, they belt up, he drives off.

"I don't suppose you're interested in convincing me you haven't lost your mind?" Sam says after a few minutes of silence.

"Well, my apartment's been pretty thoroughly bugged. Good odds your car has a tracking device."

"Motor Pool," Sam says. "Yeah. So where're we going?"

"Breakfast," Cam says. He's not sure he'll spot a tail, but Sam probably will. She's the one who got the training first-hand that he only got bits and pieces of at second-hand.

"Any idea who did it?" Sam asks. She's turned a little sideways in her seat, enough to be able to keep a good eye on his rearview mirror and the traffic all around.

"I'm hoping it's the NID," Cam says, keeping his eyes on the road, "because I'd really hate to think it's the SGC. Went over my place with a fine-toothed comb, too, but I don't think they meant me to know they'd been there. Message on my machine, too. Somebody couldn't be bothered to give his name wants me to call him about National Security."

"Probably Agent Hardin. He's the lead investigator on the team investigating Dani's disappearance," Sam says.

"He the one searched her apartment?" Cam asks, and he keeps his voice as level as he knows how, but out of the corner of his eye he sees Sam's head whip around toward him.

"Probably. He's had a team out here for almost three weeks. Why?"

He doesn't say anything. The diner he's heading for is up ahead. He turns off the road, finds a spot, parks.

"Cam?"

He grips the steering wheel and stares at nothing. "It's nothing you want to hear." He's about to get out of the car when she grabs his arm, digging her fingers in hard enough that he feels it through the leather of his jacket. He looks at her in faint surprise.

"My friend is missing - don't tell me I don't want to hear something!"

"Fine. When they searched her place, they smashed everything they could. Come on. Let's eat."

She follows him inside, and when they sit down, Cam can still see that she's trying to make _sense_ of it. Working her way through the possibilities. Wasn't them. Just their job. Some good reason. Trying and failing to make any of them _fit._ And none of them do.

"Why?" she finally says.

"We've never gotten on with them. She's never gotten on with them." Interdepartmental friction elevated to the level of trench warfare, with Kinsey, with Simmons (both, thank fuck, before Cam's time) trying to get SG-1, the SGC, mothballed and out of the way for every possible reason from interdepartmental politics to a grudge match to paving the way for a _Goa'uld_ takeover of Earth. There have always been a few good people in the NID (just as there have been a few bad people at the SGC), but a secret civilian agency without oversight, not answerable to anybody Cam has the clearance to know about? That's a recipe for hubris and corruption. They're supposed to be the civilian review agency for the Stargate Program. And who reviews _them?_

"They're supposed to be looking for her," Sam says, after the waitress has been, left coffee and menus, and gone.

"Well, Sam, I'm pretty sure her furniture is no longer a threat to National Security," Cam says. He picks up the menu, already missing Momma's breakfasts. Decides on the "Hungry Man Special" (he knows he likes the food here; this is where he and Jackson would come, staggering out of the Mountain with no particular notion what o'clock it was topside, him too hungry to go home and cook for them, and he just won't think about that right now, no.)

"But if she-" Sam says, and stops, because Sam has always been damned good at not thinking about things it isn't safe to think about. He isn't sure what part of it she isn't thinking about, but a lot of it isn't safe. He isn't going to startle her. "You went to her place," she says, after she has a sip of coffee and a think.

"Sure. First stop. Then I went on home."

The waitress comes back and they order. All Sam wants is a cantaloupe with cottage cheese; Cam always used to tell her she couldn't save the world on a breakfast like that. Of course, at that same period, Jackson's idea of breakfast had been Commissary waffles with four containers of syrup, which she'd cut into tiny pieces, and then throw out uneaten. _(He isn't going to think about that now.)_

"So how's what you came out here to do coming along?" he asks. They're used to talking in code. It's second nature.

Sam makes what Momma would call a 'pickle face.' "Just a matter of slotting in a different trained chimp ... sorry."

"It's okay," Cam says. He's heard as much - and worse - from Jackson in the past six months. That they wanted her for her "celebrity" status, not for anything she could _do._

Sam waves a hand, banishing the last couple of sentences from existence. "They've been preparing for this for over ten years. They've kept the Briefing Books updated. The Committee is writing the speech. They just want the appropriately credentialed-and-pedigreed person to give it. Sure, a civilian would be better. I'm a good second choice."

"You'll be famous."

"They'll have kittens," Sam says. But not as though it worries her particularly; in fact, from her tone of voice, it sounds as if it's a positive perk. "And at least - from some points of view - there's one advantage to me being their little talking head."

Cam raises his eyebrows questioningly, although he's pretty sure he knows what's coming.

Sam smiles vindictively. "Air Force. Nobody can rewrite _my_ employment contract retroactively to send me off to serve at the pleasure of the Committee with the exciting alternative of being jailed for violating National Security if I refuse."

He hadn't quite known that. Jackson was always vague about the details of the terms under which she worked for the SGC - not in an evasive way, but in a confused way - and since the SGC had pretty much been built up around her, the fact that there wasn't anything concrete on paper besides her NDAs had actually made sense to Cam. "She resigned," he says.

"And they'd have to accept her resignation for it to stick," Sam answers with a sigh. Their food comes, and they eat.

#

"I can find out about the stuff in your house," Sam says halfway through breakfast.

"It'd be nice," Cam says. "I like the thought of the NID thinking I'm stupid enough to have hidden her somewhere, and then be stupid enough to phone her from my own home phone. Or her being stupid enough to call me." Lie by misdirection. Pretending he thinks that Jackson's still alive, watching every word, making sure he never refers to her in the past tense. Twelve years of keying in to how precisely Jackson measured every word - even while drunk, drugged, half-conscious, out of her mind - has made it possible.

Sam laughs mockingly. "She'll never call. Not even you." A moment later the sense of what she's said penetrates, and she looks horrified. At her rudeness, if nothing else.

He reaches across the table and takes her hand. "Sam. You and I've gone round about this. I know you meant nothing for me but good. I love her. She loves me. Don't matter if I don't ever see her again until the day I die. Won't change a thing."

Sam squeezes his hand back, shaking her head just a little. "Why don't any of the people who deserve a 'happily ever after' ever get it?" she asks.

"Can't say," Cam answers.

#

They finish up breakfast, and Cam heads back to drop Sam at her car. She tells him where she's living - same place he was when he first got here; the short-lease complex that serves a lot of the transient personnel for Peterson and Cheyenne Mountain. He gets there after her; when she lets him into the living room, it's got a few pieces of shiny-cheap rental furniture and enough black-box tech to fly an Asgard spaceship.

"First let's see who set the bugs on your place. Then we can decide what to do about them." Sam opens her laptop and starts tapping keys.

"You don't need all this to give a speech?" Cam says, because he's pretty sure Sam's place is bug-free, and they aren't in public now.

"I don't like being spied on either," Sam says. "Fortunately I had an alibi, because I was in Nevada, and highly-visible. Everybody at Area 51 is tracked 24/7 for security purposes with their security implants. They just ran back the computer log, and there I was. Why haven't they used _Archimedes_ to track Dani with her implant? Isn't she in orbit right now?"

"She is. And Offworld Section personnel stopped getting implants when the Lucians figured out how to ping them. Anybody who had them from earlier had theirs removed." And they'd figured that out after the Lucians had beamed their team on board their _ha'tak._ They'd had to cut the transponders out of every member of their team before they'd even tried to escape.

"That's useful," Sam mutters, half to herself.

"Alibi?" Cam prompts, because he _doesn't_ have one.

"So they figured she was gone - Monday - and I was flown out here Wednesday - ahead of schedule - just in time to bang into General O'Neill as he was leaving. He told me he'd searched her place and checked yours because you'd gone off on a month's leave - and it was possible - then - that she was just hiding out at your place not answering her phone or her pager. Then the NID showed up and started asking me a lot of pointed questions to the tune of what I'd done to make her vanish, and where had I hidden her."

"Pretty hard to do from Nevada," Cam says.

"Thank god for tracking devices," Sam says mockingly. All the while she's been talking, she's been tapping keys and staring into the screen. Cam knows she wrote most of the SGC's security software; he's pretty sure she left herself a backdoor in. Or three. "No," she says. "Not us. Nothing that was logged through any of the SGC computers, nothing that crossed Landry's desk, even as a request to bug the residence of SGC personnel. Which makes it NID."

"Because they don't ask," Cam says.

"They never asked _us,_ " Sam replies.

"When do you go to New York?" Cam asks, leaning back on the couch to stare at the ceiling.

"Friday. A week of meetings starting Monday. And... the world changes."

"Nobody'll notice."

"We hope. What we _know_ is going to happen is that every nation on Earth is going to be screaming for free and unrestricted access to the Stargate. And everything - _everything_ \- we've ever had to deal with in terms of the NID, the Trust, anybody who thinks that the alien civilizations we've spent twenty years forging relationships with represent nothing more than an opportunity for looting-" she sighs. "It's going to look like a church picnic."

"Tell 'em 'no.'"

"Oh, Cam, I'm pretty sure those days are gone."

"Too bad," Cam says without a lot of interest. "Wonder if there're any more canopic jars out there?"

Sam looks at him. He smiles. "Momma always told Ash and me if we didn't settle our problems, she'd settle 'em for us."

"You think the solution to our problems is to have the _Goa'uld_ back?" she asks, and her voice holds a combination of disbelief and horror.

"No, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Not a solution, Sam, no. More a kind of inevitable consequence. Not the _Goa'uld_ , maybe. Just something bad. Could just be the Asgard getting really pissed off. Could just be what happens when instead of suitcase nukes, we have _naquadaah_ bombs being traded on the black market. Or people killing people with zats. Or ... you met the Aaschen."

"We locked those coordinates out of our dialing computers," Sam says slowly.

"Sure," Cam says, smiling at her sunnily. "But they're still in the mission reports. They're accessible from an offworld Gate. Bet you fifty bucks somebody dials the Aaschen homeworld within a year."

"That isn't funny," Sam says slowly.

"Isn't meant to be," Cam says, shaking his head. "Just facts. Sixty-five people in Offworld Section - that's Air Force and civilian consultants. Another forty from IOC member nations. That's two-thirds of what it was ten years ago, when it was all SGC. How long do you think the new kids are going to wait to train and equip their teams? And how many of 'em are going to read the fine print before they go?"

"Why didn't you...?" Sam says.

"You know," Cam says, "a long time ago someone that I respect one hell of a lot told me that I was just here to yell and shoot. And for about the last ten years General Landry's made sure to remind me that I don't set policy. And he's pretty much right. I didn't think up all this myself, you know. You go on back into the mainframe, you'll see that Jackson's been writing memos for the last six months covering just about all of this."

Sam closes her eyes. "She couldn't have changed the IOC's mind."

"No," Cam says, "she couldn't."

Sam takes a deep breath. "At least she isn't here to see it. And now - before the world goes completely to hell - what shall we do about the fact that the NID has bugged your place?"

#

Sam gives him a number of options - find the bugs and remove them, fry them in place, jam them full time, jam them intermittently.

"I'd recommend intermittent jamming myself," she says seriously. "You'll have privacy for those important moments - assuming you have any - and the rest of the time, they'll think they're working perfectly, so they won't get suspicious."

"Won't it take you a while to build something like that?" Cam asks.

"Oh, no," Sam says. "You can just have my back-up unit."

She takes him into the bedroom and opens her closet, where something about the size of a PlayStation is squatting on the floor. A little red light is blinking evilly on the top of it, and green lights - like a highly-illegal radar detector - are sweeping back and forth across the front. "Red means there's an active listening device within range; green means it's successfully jamming," she says.

"So they change colors?" he asks doubtfully.

"Oh, sure," she says. "Watch." She squats down, and pulls out a second device just like the first one. "Rechargeable battery; I'd leave it plugged in if I were you, but it should run about eight hours on a full charge. It's charged up right now, though, so ... here."

She sets it in the middle of the room, then reaches out to the other device and turns it off. Cam doesn't need to be told to keep his mouth shut. Then she flips the second device on. At first the light on the top is green, then yellow, then red. The display on the front goes from red, through yellow, to green. "Okay," Sam says. "It's working." She digs around in the closet for the power cord. Coils it up and hands it to him. "It won't protect you from a parabolic mike. But anything in the house and you'll be fine."

"You want me to just carry it out like this?"

"I'd throw my coat over it if I were you."

#

He left North Carolina Friday morning. This is Tuesday afternoon. He goes back to his condo with Sam's box, and the moment he takes it inside all the lights go red, and then some of them go green. He takes it into the kitchen, sets it on the counter, and goes through gun in hand (clearing the place again, making sure it's secure.) When he's done with that, he decides that it'd probably be just as well for him to call General Landry back, and nothing in that conversation the NID can't listen to. So he switches off Sam's toy and picks up his phone.

The General tells him a number of things he already knew (Dr. Jackson is missing; we're all very concerned) and asks him a number of insanely stupid questions (Did she seem upset to you recently? Do you know where she is? Have you heard from her since you went on leave?) Cam answers General Landry's questions with scrupulous exactness: yes, she's been upset about the upcoming public disclosure of the Stargate Program. No, he doesn't know where Dr. Jackson is. No, he hasn't heard from Dr. Jackson since he went on leave. General Landry says that he appreciates that Colonel Mitchell is still on leave, but he'd _really_ appreciate it if Colonel Mitchell would come up to the Mountain to assist the NID with its investigation.

"Investigation?" Cam says, giving Landry his very best 'wide-eyed' voice. "I thought they were looking for her."

"Of course they are, Colonel Mitchell. And they'd like your help to find her."

"Yes sir," Cam says fervently. "Now?" he asks. Maybe Agent Hardin will be there.

"Report to my office at 0800 tomorrow," General Landry says. "And Colonel Mitchell, I expect your full cooperation."

"Oh absolutely, sir." He hangs up the phone, flips the jammer back on. "Stargate Command will always receive my full cooperation, General, sir."

#

Wednesday morning starts promisingly, because Agent Hardin is in General Landry's office when Cam arrives. Unfortunately Sam is there, too, so Cam doesn't get a chance to throttle the life out of Hardin, because Sam moves fast enough to slam him up against the wall and then there are two SFs in the office - not laying on hands, just putting themselves between him and Hardin - and Hardin's smirking at him as if he's proved some kind of point. General Landry is yelling, but Landry's spent so much time yelling about one thing and another that Cam pretty much tunes him out.

Cam doesn't bother to try to get through the SFs, because they're guys he knows, and they'd have to get rough, and then _he'd_ have to get rough, and it wouldn't be fair. He knows what Hardin looks like now. There'll be other times.

He spends the rest of the day in an interrogation room while Hardin and another agent - a woman named Wong - alternately try to coax and badger information out of him. There are two SFs in the room the whole time (by order of General Landry) and he suspects that Sam is behind the one-way glass.

Wong (first name Francesca) is supposed to be the 'good cop.' She goes with the True Love/Band of Brothers line, saying that she understands his deep feelings for Jackson, that he isn't in trouble, that _she_ isn't in trouble, that they only want to help her and help him and maybe teach the world to sing in perfect harmony while they're at it.

"Sure," Cam says seriously, once Wong's made her pitch. "Why, she could be hurt. She could be dying. And if she isn't now, when she comes back and sees her apartment, she'll probably have a stroke."

Wong makes a face and huffs off, and Cam sits back and lets Hardin threaten him for a while. Since Cam and Hardin both know that Cam wants Hardin dead, there aren't any surprises there. Since they both know that Cam isn't going to make a move on him here no matter what, Cam stares at the ceiling while Hardin tries on everything he can think of. Jackson was unstable. Jackson was crazy. Jackson was insubordinate. Jackson falsified mission reports. Jackson was fucking General O'Neill and everything else male she could get her hands on. Jackson was a lesbian (Cam's not really sure how they reconcile these two concepts, or the idea of her being a lesbian with the affair he'd been having with her. He doubt's Hardin's a major fan of either truth or logic.) It hurts, some of it, but Cam has plans for Hardin, so he doesn't let it show.

"Kinda awkward if all this got out after she went to the UN, don't you think?" he says, when Hardin runs out of steam.

Hardin announces he's going out for a cup of coffee, giving a good performance of a man pushed to the breaking point of his temper. All this means is that it's Wong's turn again. They've been at this three hours now. Cam's bored. Not so bored he'd rather be being interrogated by somebody who doesn't have to stick just to words. But still.

Wong tries calm reasonability this time. About how they may not like each other, but they need to work together. Because if Cam doesn't cooperate with the NID's investigation, it will have a serious negative impact on his career at a point where he can least afford that. "Come again?" Cam says, because this is at least entertaining.

"As the Program becomes a matter of public record, there will be an expectation that those individuals who have supported it over the long-term will at last be in a position to achieve significant recognition for their sacrifices. Naturally, all the SGC's files won't be unsealed. But enough of them will be to have a positive impact on your career, Colonel Mitchell."

"You're saying if I'm a good boy I can turn in my bird for a star."

"I'm not with the Air Force, Colonel. But it's certainly the way to bet."

"Well, my momma'd like that. And I haven't seen Jackson since I left on leave."

"You spent the night in her apartment," Wong says.

"You've got her bedsheets, so you can prove that," Cam says. "I'm not denying it, though."

"I know Agent Hardin is rather confrontational," Wong says, with a delicacy that Cam can only admire, "but his allegations, they don't...?"

"Well," Cam says consideringly, "most of 'em are true. Hell, honey, we're all crazy here. Don't know about the 'lesbian' thing, though."

"And it doesn't bother you?" Wong asks.

"Being crazy?" Cam asks. "You have to be to do this job. When was the last time I saw Jackson? About three weeks ago. Went to her apartment the night before I left on a month's leave. Cooked us dinner, had sex, slept there, left around five-thirty the next morning."

"Was she still there when you left?" Wong asks.

Cam's face doesn't change at all. "Jackson isn't a morning person, Agent Wong. I didn't wake her up. Do you want a yes or no answer, or is that good enough?"

"No, that's fine. You were gone for three weeks. Why didn't you call to see how she was?"

"Not that kind of a relationship."

"And you came back early from leave."

"Damned glad I did - and I sure as hell can't figure out why none of you people thought to call me, considering it's apparently your theory that Jackson and I are involved in some conspiracy I can't quite imagine. Why I _did_ come back early was to see Sam - Colonel Carter - while she was here, and to see if I could sweet-talk General Landry into sending me to New York with Jackson."

"Who's vanished," Agent Wong points out.

"Unless you people've kidnapped her. Again. For reasons I also can't imagine. But - hey - still got _Goa'uld_ setting your policy?"

"The NID isn't the Trust, Colonel Mitchell," Agent Wong says, and she's sounding a little snippy now.

"Sure, sure. Just another faceless government agency answerable to nobody. Completely different."

"Not unlike the SGC, wouldn't you agree, Colonel Mitchell?"

"Oh, no, Agent Wong. You see, we've always had to answer to the NID."

About then Hardin comes back. He and Hardin and Wong play 'tag' for the rest of the afternoon, although after the first couple of hours, Hardin gives up on asking Cam the hypothetical and conditional questions: _Why didn't you know Jackson was going to bolt? Why do you think she ran? Why didn't you phone her while you were gone? Why aren't you upset by her sexual history?_ and sticks to the ones that might actually help them find her (might have actually helped them find her.) Tastes, interests, inclinations.

_Where do you think she'll go to hide?_

It's at this point that the NID gives up a piece of information that Cam didn't have, and it's a piece that surprises him. A lot. All of Jackson's accounts - checking, savings, portfolio, one or two others - have been zeroed. The NID is trying to trace the money trail (so far with no success), but the last of the transactions occurred on Wednesday morning at the opening of business. Four days after Jackson no longer existed.

"You look surprised, Colonel. Girlfriend holding out on you?" Hardin sneers.

"Just wondering how she managed to do all that banking after she'd vanished and you _still_ can't find her," Cam says mildly.

"We'll find her," Hardin says. "And when we do-"

"I got it," Cam says. "You'll arrest her for quitting her job."

"Of course we won't," Wong says (they've decided to double-team him now.) "But I've read Dr. Jackson's file. She's been under extraordinary stress for a very long time. This isn't the behavior of someone who's making the best possible decisions for her life. Colonel, I'd like to believe we live in a perfect world, and I'm sure you would, too. But we don't. Right now, Dr. Jackson is a playing piece for whoever gets their hands on her first - and believe me, someone will. They'll want her cooperation, they'll want what she knows - and they'll be ruthless about obtaining it."

"I do not know where she is," Cam says, spacing the words out carefully, because he is getting just a little tired of this. Lunch sucked, too.

"You know her better than anyone else," Wong says.

Cam just laughs, because he's willing to bet, even now, even after twelve years of sleeping and waking and loving and everything they've been to each other, that O'Neill still knows her better. And that Sam could give the hellhounds as many places to look as he can, because Sam knew Jackson back when Jackson might still have been willing _(able)_ to tell girlhood secrets, and Cam knows she doesn't have any family, doesn't have a home, but there might have been places that she'd have wanted to see again, if that was the way she'd wanted to run. But he says that he doesn't know (true) and that he doesn't think she'd stay in the US (true) and that she's loved Egypt for as long as he's known her (also true.)

That makes Hardin and Wong flurry so hard - both of them leave the room at once - that Cam wonders if they've spent the last three weeks looking for her inside the US without once considering she might be elsewhere. It'd be SOP to seal the exit points as well as they could, but they have no idea what name she could have been using. And they weren't even looking for her until late Monday. That would have given her (the NID _has_ to be thinking that way) all of Saturday and Sunday and Monday morning to get on a plane to parts unknown. If they're serious about wanting her back, they're either running an international operation (he doesn't think they're sanctioned for that, but he can ask Sam), doing a handshake deal with another agency that is, or passing the word through the IOC that Jackson's off the rez. He'd worry a lot more about all those possibilities if she was out there to be hurt. But he's supposed to believe that she is.

They end the day with a flourish: Hardin threatening Cam's career, his freedom, his future, his pension, and his place in the history books. Considering Cam's risked death on an almost-daily basis for the past twelve years, it isn't as impressive as it could be. But after nine glorious hours they're through with the rubber hoses (only metaphorical, and he's almost sorry. Almost) and an airman brings him a summons from General Landry to report to his office _immediately._ But he's been trained by people who were trained by the best in lying-cheating-and-stealing, and right now a lot depends on how good a liar he is. The story he's selling is his belief that Jackson's out there and the NID is after her. So he makes sure his first stop is Sam. She isn't that hard to find. She's in Jackson's office, which is the first place he looks.

It's not too much of a mess (not like her apartment) but it's gotten a thorough going-over, and most of the artifacts are gone. Sam's standing in a corner, looking at a photo on the wall. SG-Classic. Early days: Teal'c glitters, Jackson and O'Neill are laughing, Sam looks shy (and very goddamned young.) There's a gas giant taking up half the sky in the background; the picture was taken offworld somewhere. "Done for the day?" Sam asks, not turning around.

"Yeah," Cam says, sighing. "They said I was very helpful, and they might have more questions later. I'm supposed to go up to Landry and get yelled at now. Gonna head on home then. Maybe get drunk."

"Good plan," Sam says. She reaches out and touches the photo.

"Hey, Sam?" he says. "NID's just domestic, right?"

She turns around, frowning faintly. "Yeah. Oversight for other intelligence agencies and the Stargate Program. Why?"

"If Jackson's outside the country, what are they going to do about looking for her?"

"I think they'd turn it over to the CIA. The CIA's cleaned house for the NID before." She purses her lips, thinking. "Here, too, about -what? Thirteen, fourteen years ago? When the NID was riddled with _Goa'uld_ and their agents and the Pentagon thought we might be too. They used the CIA to clear us." She laughs shortly. "That's how General O'Neill met his wife. She was the lead agent on the investigative team."

"Hope you aren't thinking of marrying Hardin."

"Not even close."

Cam forces a tired smile. "Gonna go take my lumps. Take care of yourself."

"Cam," Sam says carefully. "You won't do anything ... stupid ... will you?"

"No, baby. Nothing stupid at all. I promise."

#

General Landry sings him chapter and verse about conduct becoming to officers in the United States Air Force, and follows it up with the information that Cam is on desk duty for the immediate future and he is to consider himself restricted to the El Paso County limits, and if General Landry becomes _really_ unhappy, one Colonel Cameron Mitchell will find himself restricted to his on-Base quarters. Possibly forever. Since Cam really doesn't give a rat's ass one way or the other, he's able to assure Landry with an untroubled conscience that he has no intention of going anywhere.

He stops on the way home at a drive-through to pick up food (since he hasn't had the heart to shop yet.) Stops at the Qwik-Mart for milk anyway. Goes on home and fires up Sam's gizmo. Copies down the number Hardin left on his answering machine from memory, then fires up his laptop and uses the criss-cross directory to find out what hotel it is while he eats. Hardin's been on top of God's Earth too damned long, but he promised Sam he wouldn't be stupid, and Cam doesn't like to break promises to friends.

He tidies up the kitchen and turns off the jammer and shuts down his computer and goes back out to his car. Drives to the liquor store and buys a good bottle of whiskey and heads on to the hotel.

At the desk, a combination of his military ID, a smile, and some Southern honey in his voice gets him Hardin's room number. The locals love the military here, and like to cooperate when they can, and he's not asking for much. He goes on up and knocks. There's light showing through the peephole, and a 'Do Not Disturb' tag on the door; Agent Hardin didn't strike him as much for the local nightlife. After a moment Cam hears movement on the other side of the door. "Who is it?" Hardin asks.

"It's Colonel Mitchell, sir. Wonder if I might have a word with you?"

Hardin opens the door. Cam holds up the bag. "Peace offering. Wanted to apologize for takin' a swing at you this mornin'. You're just doin' your job. And I thought of something that might help you out. Didn't know if I'd see you at the Mountain. I'm not exactly General Landry's favorite person right now."

"Come in, Colonel," Hardin says. He steps back, allowing Cam to enter. Cam hands him the bottle.

"I know they expense you guys," Cam says, looking around the room, "but they probably bitch about it, too." He shrugs.

Hardin isn't planning to unbend that quickly. "You said you had something for me?"

"Yeah. Unless you folks have more on Jackson than the SGC ever got, you don't have much on her before age twelve or thereabouts."

Hardin pulls a notebook out of his pocket and flips through it. "Parents died, age eight. Entered New York State Child Welfare System, age twelve."

"She spent the period in between in Central and South America with her grandfather."

"Where?" Hardin demands.

Cam shrugs. "His name was Nicholas Ballard. Maybe you can trace him. Belize'd be one place, I'm guessing."

"Why didn't you mention this earlier?"

"Didn't think of it. She never talked about her childhood." He'd wanted an excuse to come here tonight. "Border's pretty close." And everybody in this part of the world knows it leaks like a sieve. They'll be thinking that she could get across it in a hundred places without showing a passport at all. And buy half-a-dozen new ones from as many countries the moment she hit Mexico City.

"Your cooperation won't go unnoted," Hardin says grudgingly. "We just need to contain this situation as soon as possible, Colonel."

"Sure," Cam says. "You mind if I...?" He gestures toward the bathroom, and Hardin nods. Cam goes in, takes a piss, washes his hands, all perfectly innocent. He comes out, thanks Hardin for his time, and leaves. On his way out of the hotel, he checks the service entrances, and casts an eye over the uniforms of the service staff.

His sleep that night is untroubled.

#

Even though he's technically still got two days of leave (four, really, isn't supposed to report back until Monday) he signs into the Mountain on Thursday. There are four NID agents assigned to the investigation; Hardin and Wong are the superstars doing the rainmaking, and they've got a couple of spear-carriers with them to fetch-and-carry. What that involves right now (so Cam's heard from Nyan already, and Nyan's livid about it) is pulling copies of every single one of Jackson's files and reports and memos and every scrap of paper she set pen to in twenty years at the SGC and combing through them for evidence of God knows what. The second-string looks pretty sandbagged when Cam catches up to one of them in the Commissary around noon.

"Hey," he says, sitting down at the table. "Agent Bellis, is it?"

"Colonel Mitchell," Agent Bellis says. He stops being wary once Cam assures him that no, he and Hardin have mended fences; he stopped by the hotel last night to straighten things out there.

"Yes, sir, he said," Bellis says. "I just hope ... well, half of her notes aren't even in _English._ "

Cam laughs. "You ask the rest of the Linguistics Department, maybe they can help you out. Say, what do you folks do for recreation around here? You can't be spending all your time working."

"Seems like it," Bellis says wearily. "I'm hoping they find her before I become fluent in _Goa'uld_. At least tomorrow's Friday. Agent Hardin's going to take us all out for a decent meal tomorrow night when we get out of here."

"He need any recommendations on a good place, have him look me up," Cam says.

"I'll do that, Colonel," Bellis says.

#

Sam's leaving tomorrow mid-day. Cam makes the effort to shop, and invites her over for dinner. He won't have time to make dinner and dessert both, so she offers to bring something decent. She sits at the breakfast bar in his condo and they chat about nothing much as he cooks. The meetings, the reactions, how quickly it will leak to the world press, the reaction there. She looks past tired and on her way to haggard, but Cam's pretty sure the NID's been ordered to treat Sam with kid gloves. She's the IOC's poster girl just now.

"At least we can finally put the Alec Coulson story to bed. That will be a relief. He can even come home," Sam says.

"Have to be kind of a shock after all this time," Cam says.

"Well, they _do_ get newspapers at the Alpha Site," Sam says.

Dinner is a quick-and-dirty Stroganoff - Cam picked up a nice Burgundy to go with it - and after dinner Sam points out he bought this place after she moved to Nevada and she's never seen it. Cam gives her the tour. When they get to the bedroom, she opens the closet (the jammer's there) and switches it on. As soon as it's showing Christmas, she grabs him and slams him up against the wall, a move that catches him by surprise.

_"I know you know where she is, goddammit, Cam - tell me!"_

He reaches up slowly and closes his hands around her wrists. Her hands are fisted in his shirt. "Neither one of us is ever going to see her again in this life, Sam. They won't ever find her. She isn't dead. And I haven't seen her since I left on leave. Let it go."

Her face crumples and twists, and she collapses slowly forward. He works his arms free from between them and holds her while she cries.

It takes her a long time to cry herself out. She's been holding this in a long time, and she wails like her heart is breaking, like there's no comfort anywhere in the world. He rubs her back silently; he doesn't have any words of comfort left. Finally she pushes herself away from his chest and staggers off to the bathroom. She closes the door. After a moment he hears water running.

He goes and strips off his shirt; it's pulled, torn a little, and very wet. Puts on a clean one and sits on the bed, waiting for her to come out. He thinks of the times Jackson would share this bed just to sleep, because his place was closer to the Mountain than hers and they were both dog-tired. He's probably got more than a few things of hers still kicking around here, unless O'Neill got rid of them. He hasn't checked yet.

After about ten minutes Sam comes out. Face washed clean, eyes red, jaw set, and Sam Carter will die but she won't break. Not in any lasting way. Go right down to her knees, sure. All of them had, one mission or another. Go down and scream to God and the heavens to let it be _over._ And get up again and shoulder the weight and go on. And all of them knew there would come a last time, but hers hasn't come yet. "Okay," she says, and her voice is hoarse but determinedly steady. "You ready for dessert yet?"

They go back to the kitchen, and they eat dessert, and they talk about what they might both be doing in a few months, and Sam talks about her research projects, and how maybe she'll just ask to be reassed to Atlantis once things start heating up here. And Cam tells her to be careful in the big city, and he walks her to her car, and he hugs her goodbye, and she kisses him on the cheek. She drives off, and he goes inside, and switches off the jammer, and cleans up the kitchen.

And his sleep that night is untroubled.

#

Friday night around 2000 he walks into the hotel through the service entrance, wearing a white shirt hanging out over his waistband and a pair of olive fatigue pants and carrying a plumber's canvas toolbag. He's broken into and out of more prisons and spaceships than he can remember offhand; it isn't hard to liberate a master key-card. He brings it right back, too, because Hardin's been kind enough to leave his spare key-card in his room.

Then he goes back to the room to wait.

About 2330, Cam hears Hardin enter the room alone. Cam's been sitting in the bathroom, in the dark, for the last three hours; he gets quietly to his feet. He hears Hardin moving around the bedroom, the rattle of hangers as he hangs up his suit coat.

When Hardin heads for the bathroom, Cam jerks the door open quickly. Hardin stands shocked for the beautiful moment necessary for Cam to take him in the larynx with an elbow strike. Hardin is flailing, but not really capable of fighting back, when Cam picks him up and drags him over to the bed. He tosses him onto it, and punches him in the throat again for good measure. Hardin seems to be having a lot of trouble breathing, but he's still conscious, and oh yeah, he recognizes Cam all right. He's clawing at Cam's arms, but there's no strength in him. Cam leans over and whispers softly in his ear. "You shouldn't have trashed her apartment the way you did, you sick sonovabitch."

He holds Hardin down with one hand - it doesn't take much - and searches him with the other. Pistol in the shoulder holster. Silencer in his pocket. Good. Cam won't have to use his own piece. He assembles the weapon - he's pretty sure Hardin's going to strangle, but it's good to be sure - and when he's done, presses the barrel against Hardin's eye and squeezes off a shot. The thrashing stops.

He drops the gun on the body - he's wearing gloves - then strips his gloves off and drops them back into his bag. Sam's jammer is still running. If the NID bug their own rooms (it's the way to bet) nothing will show up at the listening post. If they aren't, he has nothing to worry about anyway. He lets himself out of the room and walks off down the hall, carrying the bag. Anybody seeing him from a distance will figure he's maintenance staff. He walks out the service door of the hotel, down a couple of blocks, back to his car. Gets in, drives home. Tonight, again, he sleeps without dreams.

#

He's at the grocery Saturday morning, finally doing that full-on shopping he's been putting off, because today he feels like doing chores. Maybe make up a batch of bread, run the car through the car-wash to get the road-dirt off (grounds committee at the complex has rules about washing cars on the property, which is a crying shame, in Cam's opinion), finally get on top of that laundry that's been piling up. But his phone rings while he's in the produce section, wondering why it is that all the _damnyankees_ don't just starve to death, if this is what they've got to go on with, and it's Major Simmons, Landry's XO. He's to come in, right now, emergency.

So Cam grabs a store clerk on his way out, and apologizes, and says he's just had an unexpected emergency and could somebody put the contents of his cart back on the shelves, please, ma'am, and gets into his car and goes. They've all of them walked out of every imaginable place in the last decade or so, and interrupted activities you wouldn't think could _be_ interrupted, when the phone rang or the beeper went off. This is one of the milder forms of Life Called on Account of Stargate.

He gets to the Mountain, and checks through, and the orders waiting for him at the last checkpoint are to report to General Landry's office as soon as possible, and Cam can't think of anything he's done to piss Landry off lately, so he goes and changes and heads on down. Wong is there, looking like grim death.

"Sir?" Cam says. "Did you-" Because he ought to be asking if they've found Jackson. And a part of him (buried way down deep where he isn't going to show it to anybody) is afraid of the thought of the NID going to his home, going to talk to Momma and Daddy, going to see if he really went there at all, finding Alex.

"Sit down, Colonel," Landry says.

"Where were you last night, Colonel?" Wong snaps, and it looks like Wong has decided to be 'bad cop' today.

"Home," Cam says. "You've got my place bugged, Agent Wong. You ought to know that." And he'd left the television on when he went out, and a recording playing of 'Cam moving around the apartment' noises. They know his evening routine by now. They also know their equipment fades in and out randomly.

"Colonel?" General Landry says, looking thunderous.

"Got home, place'd been searched, so I checked for bugs. After I talked to you, I figured it must've been the NID, so I just left 'em. Don't want to interfere with their investigation. But that means," he says, and he's talking directly to Agent Wong now, "that they know I went straight home last night and stayed there. So I don't see what these questions are about."

"Agent Hardin was found murdered this morning," Agent Wong says.

"Well, under most circumstances I might want to have a word with me too," Cam says. "But since you've given me witnesses to my whereabouts from around 1900 hours last night to 0830 this morning, I'd say I'm in the clear."

General Landry looks as if he can't decide which of them he wants to yell at first, and it takes him a minute to make up his mind. "Agent Wong, if you have - in fact - been conducting clandestine surveillance of officers under my command without my knowledge or authorization, this is absolutely unacceptable, is that clear?"

"General Landry, what is clear to me is that Stargate Command is long overdue for a thorough housecleaning," Wong fires right back. "In the three weeks since I've been here, I've seen nothing but laxity, irregularities, and behavior more suited to a- a _college campus_ than a military command. I realize that it is far from the job we were sent here to do, but consider this your notice that all of these matters will be addressed - in detail - in my report."

"Oh, feel free," General Landry says. "And while you're writing your report, I'll be writing one of my own. About the fact that you seem to have nothing better to do with your time than to harass my officers and to vandalize the property of my personnel under the guise of conducting an investigation which seems to have been remarkably unproductive so far. Wherever Dr. Jackson is now, I find it really unlikely that she'll call Colonel Mitchell up just to chat. Almost as unlikely, Agent Wong, as I find it that a Colonel in the United States Air Force, a man who has served this country honorably and with distinction for over twenty years, is going to sneak into a hotel room and shoot a man in the head just because he doesn't like him very much."

Cam would find this vote of confidence a lot more heartwarming if he didn't know it stemmed from the fact that Landry hates the NID more than he's irritated by Colonel Mitchell.

"Be assured that regardless of what the local police discover, we'll be conducting a full investigation of our own," Agent Wong says. Cam thinks she sounds particularly cross this morning.

"Oh, I would expect no less of you, Agent Wong," General Landry says. "And I'm sure you'll keep me updated on your progress on your search for Dr. Jackson as well." Wong almost makes it to the door before Landry lowers the boom. "Oh, and Agent Wong? I expect your listening devices to be removed from Colonel Mitchell's residence by the end of the day. I'll be sending my own people through after yours just to make sure they haven't overlooked anything."

"Your privilege, General," Wong snarls. She jerks his office door open and stalks out.

"I don't suppose I get to know what this is about?" Cam asks.

"When Agent Hardin didn't answer his phone or his pager this morning, Agent Wong got hotel authorities to let her into his room. She said he'd been shot with his own gun."

"Police?" Cam asks.

"On the scene."

"And she thinks it's murder. Hey, I even went and apologized to the guy. Wednesday night. They all know. In fact, there's probably a bottle of whiskey in Hardin's hotel room right now with my fingerprints all over it."

"I appreciate you letting me know, Colonel," General Landry says sourly. Base gossip has it that the General is working on his second ulcer now. Funny how General O'Neill and General Hammond never seemed to have those problems.

"Anything in particular you'd like me to do, General?" Cam asks.

"I'd _like_ you to go home and wait for the NID to show up, Colonel. And I'd _like_ you to stay out of trouble."

"Yes sir," Cam says smartly, getting to his feet.

#

Agents Bellis and Gordon show up around six to remove the bugs. Cam isn't worried about them finding Sam's gizmo, because it's locked in his car trunk. The gloves he wore to shoot Hardin have been cut up and the pieces tossed into a couple of different dumpsters - where he stopped for coffee, at the grocery, where he stopped for gas. His gun is back in the drawer. Cam offers the two agents coffee and pie. He's spent the day baking; he'd been sure enough that Wong would drag her heels until the last minute to stop off and resume his grocery shopping on the way home and even run the car through the car wash.

"Oh, um, thank you, Colonel, but we really need to-" Gordon says.

"Six of them?" Cam asks, holding out a bowl.

"Yes, sir," Bellis says, "a piece of pie would go down great."

Over slices of pie - Four Fruits; making the best of a bad job of supermarket produce by playing all of it off against itself in a pie, and the result isn't too bad - the agents tell Cam that the four of them left the hotel around seven, went to the Four Brothers (nice Italian place; Cam knows it), taking one car, got back to the hotel around ten or so. Gordon and Bellis went up to the room they share. Wong and Hardin went into the bar for a nightcap. Wong left first.

"And she had a breakfast meeting with him this morning, Colonel, or-" Bellis shrugs.

"Don't know what to tell you," Cam says, shaking his head. "That's all of them, right? Because the General told Agent Wong our people were going to be doing a sweep after you guys were done."

"Um, I'm the one who put them in," Gordon says, and his ears turn a little pink. "I'm really sorry, Colonel, but-"

"Nothing to worry about," Cam says easily. "You were just doing what you were told."

When they leave, he calls the Mountain and checks in. Sgt. Larkin and Sgt. McGraw arrive within the hour and pronounce his apartment bug-free.

Sgt. Larkin is a recent transfer to the SGC. Sgt. McGraw used to be on a Gate Team until one morning about five years ago when he woke up and decided he just didn't want to go through the Stargate any more. They had to sedate him in the Gate Room (which is where the epiphany occurred), but as long as he doesn't go down below Level 25 any more, he's fine.

"I hope they don't find her, sir," McGraw says, as he and Larkin are leaving. "I hope she got away."

"I wouldn't want the NID to find anybody I cared about," Cam answers. When they're gone, he goes out to the car and brings in Sam's toy. The light on the top stays green - no bugs - but he leaves it switched on anyway.

He hopes Alex is settling in all right.

He tries not to think about Jackson.

#

She's just over a month old. Hard to say whether it's an anniversary or a birthday. Cam told her that her birthday is July 8. She was born on July 8, 1995, in Alexandria, Virginia.

She's borrowed Skipper's computer. You can find out a lot of things on the Internet. What she's found out is that the kind of amnesia she's got doesn't actually exist. It's an amnesia for movies and books. A fake Hollywood kind of amnesia. Not a real-life kind. She hasn't been hurt. She doesn't have a single scar. She hasn't been sick. She's as healthy as a horse (except for a few allergies, and she checked: allergy medications do _not_ cause amnesia.) If she'd been a drug-addict, it would show. She tries to find _her_ , but it's hard to find out much with just a name and a birthdate. There are a lot of Alexandria Tylers on the Internet, and there are pictures of some of them, and none of them is her. The only thing she now knows (or at least suspects) is that whoever she used to be, she was used to running database searches.

And Cam knows her birthdate, and that she's an only child, and he knows her parents are dead, and he knows her _name._ So he has to know a lot of other things about her, too. And she can't figure out why he wouldn't tell her any of them (except that because he won't they must be horrible.) What were her parents' names? Where did she go to High School? She's twenty-two - where did she go to _college_? What kind of job does she have _(did she have)_? How did she lose her memory? Why does she know all those foreign languages? Where did she meet Cam? _(What was she doing in Colorado Springs, and why did he bring her here?)_ Cam knew so much about her, but he didn't know about the languages she knows. After he left, she asked Skipper to find people who'd talk foreign languages to her, and he did. They haven't found one she doesn't know yet. How can that be?

She wants to believe in Cam (that he's just as good and kind as she knows - in her heart - he has to be, and that he cares about her as much as she hopes he does), but it's getting harder with every day he's gone. Mrs. Mitchell says he might be back at Christmas, but that's months away. She wants to write to him, but she doesn't know where to send the letters (and she's angry with him for leaving, and if he'd wanted her to write to him he would have told her the address, and she's damned if she's going to ask his mother for it - and what if Mrs. Mitchell won't tell her?) Most of all, she's terrified to sleep at night, in case she wakes up in the morning having forgotten everything all over again, and without Cameron here to remind her. She carefully writes down everything she knows about herself and keeps the pages on the pillow beside her. It helps a little. Most of all, she stays quiet, and waits.

But maybe she's stayed too quiet - though she tries to do everything that everybody wants her to do, and to stay out of their way the rest of the time, because she knows she doesn't really belong here - because ten days after Cameron leaves, Mrs. Mitchell suggests to Skipper that he and some of the cousins might like to go into the city to spend the day at the mall. And Alex can do a little shopping (because her wardrobe is still spotty, and operating mostly on the lend-lease plan.)

"I don't think I-" she says, because room and board is bad enough, she isn't going to have Cameron's family buying her clothes.

"Don't you concern yourself," Mrs. Mitchell says. "Cameron left everything taken care of."

If its supposedly to shop, it's to cheer her up and to hang out, too. It's her and Skipper and a selection of Mitchell cousins and they go to the big mall in Asheville. (Of course, Skipper's going to be leaving in another week, and there'll go one more person she kind-of knows.)

Which is how Alex finds herself wandering through the J.C. Penney's with a bankroll fit to choke a horse stuffed into a borrowed purse and a list of 'oughts.' (As in 'you ought to think about picking this up if you happen to see it,' and she may be _amnesiac,_ but she isn't _stupid_ : they aren't _exactly_ suggestions, though the precise terms of how she fills out the list of slacks and dresses and tops and underwear and shoes is up to her.) She's already bought herself a couple of blank books and some nice pens. She'd buy herself some books for reading, but she's not sure what she likes, so she guesses she'll stick with the library for now, or all the books in the house. She wonders what she used to like to read.

She wonders what she used to like to _wear._ There are a couple of pair of khaki pants, some flannel shirts, and underwear that came with her, but nothing seems to _fit_. She's not quite sure it was hers.

"Alex? Alex Tyler?"

She turns around at the familiar voice. Familiar face, too, and she smiles. "General O'Neill - what are you doing here?"

"Business," he says, smiling at her. "Had some time to kill." He holds out his arm. She steps forward and takes it automatically. "Nice to see a familiar face."

"Oh, I, well- Cam's already gone." It's the only thing she can think of to say.

"Sure. Back to work. Busy?"

Her, he means. She wrinkles her nose. "Clothes shopping, I'm supposed to be. But I can't find anything I want to buy."

"You probably just need a break. Why don't I buy you a cup of coffee?"

"Sure."

#

She's surprised and - obviously - delighted by his offer. And completely unsuspicious. Dani wouldn't have been carrying a gun (he's pretty sure she never carried concealed, even at the end) but she wouldn't have responded to any of his nonverbal cues to bring her within reach; in fact, if she'd seen somebody as out-of-place as a Pentagon General in a North Carolina shopping mall, she'd have run first and asked questions later. Alex tucks her arm through his (on the strength of having met him exactly once, and down deep inside, where it doesn't get anywhere near anything she'll sense, O'Neill is telling her that's no way to stay alive, sweetheart) and lets him walk her out of the store.

He already knows she's here with friends. He knows where they are, and when she's supposed to meet up with them. He was watching. He also knows where there's a coffee place. He doesn't know what Alex thinks she likes, but they serve everything there. She picks something easy, a plain iced coffee. He brings them to the standing table (it's early afternoon on a weekday and there's not much traffic) and (making conversation) asks her what she's already bought.

"Blank books," she says readily. "And a couple of really nice pens. I like to write things down." She stops, telegraphing - if you know to look - that there's something she isn't saying.

"Oh?" he says casually. "Why?" He knows why.

"Oh," she says, "I just do." And now she sounds self-conscious, and guilty, and he knows that she knows she isn't supposed to say how little she knows about herself. And he knows he could get everything she knows out of her in less than an hour. Without touching her once. So he asks her about her garden.

"Here with friends?" he asks, when she's gotten about halfway through her drink. She tells him more things he already knows, including where they are. But he glances at his watch, and says it's about time for him to go, and says he'll walk her back to them. Gentlemanly behavior from a man just about old enough to be Alex Tyler's grandfather.

She's already a little unsteady by the time they're halfway down the promenade. Dazed enough not to notice or protest when he walks her out the door instead of back to the rendezvous point. By the time they get to his car, she's leaning on him heavily, and climbs into the back seat and lies down without protest. He covers her with a blanket.

Half an hour later he pulls into a rented garage to change cars. She goes into the trunk of this one. He gives her an injection that will keep her out for twelve hours. Oxygen mask. Padding. He's sorry to upset the Mitchell family, but this has to be done; Mitchell isn't going to be able to stonewall the investigation forever, and even if he can, the NID will backtrail him on general principles eventually. O'Neill gets into the car and drives.

Three hours later his cellphone rings. It's his private line: three people have the number. One isn't likely to call it, one is on the other side of the galaxy, and one is unconscious in the trunk and doesn't remember it anyway. Still, the world has a way of surprising you. He digs the phone out and puts it to his ear. "Yes?"

"My boy told me to call this number if something happened to Alex Tyler. She's disappeared."

If O'Neill weren't driving, he'd close his eyes to signify the balls-up idiocy of a universe where Cameron Mitchell not only has this number, but would _give it to his mother._ He suppose he ought to be used to things like that by now. "Tell him she's safe." He closes the phone and turns it off.

Two more hours, and he reaches a private airfield of a particularly accommodating nature, the kind where the ground crew gets everything ready and is careful not to be anywhere in sight when you actually get on and off your plane. He's filed an entirely-legitimate flight plan. He even owns the plane (Generals are entitled to a few toys.) What he does with it is his business. Most of the time he uses it for weekend getaways up to the cabin. Kerry's used to that (she never accompanies him; it isn't that kind of a marriage); so is everybody in Washington. General O'Neill takes off in his plane and nobody thinks anything of it. The fact that he knows a number of accommodating airfields - and, for that matter, airstrips where he can land and take off again without filing any flight plan whatsoever - goes without saying. And nobody does. Certainly General Jonathan J. O'Neill of Homeworld Security would never even consider bending the law.

He puts everything of an even remotely compromising nature into a shoulderbag, wraps Alex in a blanket, and slings her over his shoulder. Thinking of running across alien terrain carrying Dani. Not so many years ago. A lifetime.

He climbs into the plane and lays her down on the floor behind the seat. Checks her vitals. Still fine. Settles in to the pilot's seat, buckles up, and has a nice chat with the tower. Tower says the weather in NoCal continues fine.

Soon enough he's wheels-up and heading West. With crossing time-zones, he'll probably be hitting rush-hour traffic when he's on the ground again. A delay won't matter. The man he's going to see keeps late hours. And if he misses him at the office, O'Neill can just go on to his house. He knows where he lives. He keeps tabs on him. He's been keeping tabs on him for years.

Flying has always cleared his head. As good as fishing. Nothing to do (usually) once you hit cruising altitude but _be here._ Plenty of time to think.

He hasn't seen her, hasn't spoken to her, in ten years.

What she's done to herself is reversible. Frasier found the cure; the details are still on file. So it's _like_ death, but not as permanent. (Not that death has ever been permanent with her.) What O'Neill can't figure out is why Dani would go for a form of self-annihilation involving memory-loss: she's lost her memory enough times in her life to know that she always wants it back. He's been through her apartment (both her apartments.) She had enough drugs to kill herself that way. She had guns. She had straight-razors. She could even have hanged herself if she wanted to go for something really unpleasant (it's hard to tie a really effective Hangman's Knot, and you don't exactly get a second chance.) She took a complicated set of risks (breaking into the storage area at the SGC, smuggling the Dargol off the base, telling Mitchell her plan, getting his cooperation, hoping the compound was still good) to wipe her mind and stay alive - as somebody else - and complicated and uncertain rather than quick and sure has never been Dani's style.

Why?

He doesn't think she's sticking around in case she might be needed later. Nobody'd trust her after this last stunt anyway. Even if she could manage to prove who she is once he finished juggling her standards and getting Carter to run a couple of black programs through the various databases. It's something else.

He'll have plenty of time to think about it later. Once he's gotten the innocent that Dani's left behind out of the line of fire. He'd trust Mitchell, and he'd trust himself, and they're both too visible to guard her. There's only one other person he'd trust to take care of Alex Tyler.

#

Traffic is a bitch, even at seven o'clock local. Alex is curled up asleep on the back seat, under a blanket again; the injection is good for another couple of hours, and she'll be groggy for quite a while after that. What he slipped into her coffee should scramble her memories enough that she probably won't even remember seeing him at the mall; too bad to drop another shock on top of the last month (he knows what it's like to wake up in a strange place not knowing who you are or how you got there) but it's one hell of a lot better than being _dead._ (Shooting herself up with Dargol is as good as suicide for all practical purposes. So why didn't Dani go all the way?)

He pulls up at the gates of Giza Engineering Systems around eight-thirty. The guard on the gate wants a name. O'Neill smiles. "Phone Nielsen and tell him his dad is here."

"This had better not be a joke," the voice in O'Neill's ear says coldly, when the guard hands the phone over a few moments later.

"No joke," O'Neill says. "And come down to the car. There's something you need to see."

"You are awfully fucking sure of yourself, aren't you?"

"I'm sure you need to see this. Come alone." He hands the phone back to the guard. The guard listens for a moment. When he hangs up, he hands O'Neill a VIP tag to hang from his mirror, and waves him through.

The tags are color-coded. His takes O'Neill to a parking spot on the side of the building. Giza Engineering is a small company, but the security - thanks to the paranoid bastard who owns it - is ferocious. Nielsen is waiting outside, arms crossed. "I told you never to call me at the office, dear," he says, when O'Neill gets out.

"Come here."

Nielsen approaches warily. He's got one hand behind him - hideout piece in the small of his back, O'Neill thinks. O'Neill opens the back door of the car and steps back out of reach. "Look under the blanket."

"It isn't going to be a horse's head or something is it?" Nielsen says, walking cautiously forward, keeping one eye on O'Neill. "Because I pay my taxes, and stay out of the way of the- _Jesus Christ!_ " He stares down at Alex for a long moment. "That bastard Loki. But, no, wait." The Asgard made O'Neill's DNA copy-proof for their own obscure reasons - which is why O'Neill's clone, now living the life of Riley as John Nielsen, is currently 28 years old. They had no reason to do the same thing to Dani Jackson's.

"She's not a clone," O'Neill says, and Nielsen glares at him. Irritated with him on general principles. "She's the original."

Nielsen straightens up, folds his arms across his chest, and waits.

"Do you mind if we do this inside?" O'Neill says mildly.

"Oh sure. I'll just carry her through the lobby."

"Don't tell me you don't have a private entrance."

"RHIP?" Nielsen smiles. It doesn't reach his eyes. "Drive around the back. I'll meet you."

#

Anonymous door, anonymous stairs (because paranoid bastards don't trust elevators in emergencies), and the staircase doesn't go anywhere but Nielsen's office. It's only three flights, but O'Neill's just as glad to let the kid do the heavy lifting. The trade-off is that O'Neill goes first, of course.

The office is nice. A page out of somebody else's life. Two couches. Nielsen lays her out on one and sits down on the other. Twenty-eight and not in the military; O'Neill figures he's had more than enough time to figure out the joker in his particular deck by now. He doesn't sit down. He's been sitting for long enough that he wants to stretch out a bit.

"We're inside," Nielsen says.

"The Stargate Program is going public; talks at the UN starting this week. The IOC wanted her to be the public face of the kinder gentler Program. So she took Dargol. She thinks that her name is Alexandria Tyler and that she's twenty-two years old."

Nielsen takes a deep breath and blows it out hard. "That's ... interesting. Why would she think that?"

"Cameron Mitchell told her it was true."

"I just know you're going to ... wait. The- He was in the 302 program."

O'Neill smiles coldly. "You're behind the curve. Mitchell ran SG-1 until it was disbanded. He came in about two years after you left and led it until they rolled it up. He's been a senior member of Offworld Operations for the last decade."

"They disbanded SG-1?"

"There've been some changes."

Nielsen scrubs a hand through his hair. "You brought her here."

The statement of the obvious is just a reasonably-polite demand for information, and O'Neill takes it in that spirit. "Mitchell took her home to his family to get her out of sight. And they're going to drag Alex in just because she doesn't fit, and because she doesn't remember anything from before Dani disappeared. It's the NID. If they can't make it fit, they'll use a bigger hammer. I'd take her, but I'm under an even bigger microscope."

"Bad intel fucks over more operations than enemy action, O'Neill," Nielsen says warningly, staring at the floor. Hunched over, elbows on knees.

"Dani and Mitchell have been lovers for the past twelve years. It's a pretty open secret."

He can't remember the last time his life didn't pretty much suck, and the last month has been a trophy-quality example of the same, but the look on Nielsen's face when he rears back almost makes it all worthwhile. "Dani and...?"

"Don't tell me _you_ have any interest in taking her to bed," O'Neill says brutally, and Nielsen flinches just a little. "Yeah. Life sucks. I brought Alex here because you're the only one nobody's going to be looking at. There's no connection between you, me, the Stargate Program, Dani, none of it."

"DNA? Prints?" Nielsen asks.

"I'm taking care of that."

"What about ID?"

"You don't want me to solve all your problems for you, do you?"

Nielsen smiles, and his expression is as cold as anything O'Neill can see in the mirror. They don't like each other and never have; well, O'Neill's never liked himself much either. Nielsen glances over at the other couch. "What am I going to tell her when she wakes up?"

"Something good. I drugged her coffee and kidnapped her out of a shopping mall in Asheville this afternoon. I'm not sure how much of that she'll remember."

"Yeah. Could you do me a favor and make it another thirteen years - at least - before your next visit?"

"I think I can safely promise that," O'Neill says.

Nielsen walks him back to his car. Traffic's still a bitch when he's back on the highway.

#

He calls down to the front gate to make sure that bastard is off his property, then he calls the house to leave a vm for Mike revising 'working late' to 'working very fucking late - may sleep at the office.' Then he goes to the kitchenette to make up a fresh pot of coffee. While it's brewing, he comes back and stares at the woman (girl) lying on his couch asleep (drugged, and he wonders when she's going to wake up, and just how well she's going to take the news that she's halfway across the country from the last place she remembers, and dumped into the lap of somebody she doesn't know at all.) Younger right now than she was the first time he saw her, but close enough to that to recognize.

_Great, O'Neill. The Program's going public, so she took Dargol. As explanations go, that one leaves a helluva lot out._

And the NID's looking for her (well, they're looking for _Dani,_ but if they found Alex, it would suck for her), so Mitchell took her off and hid her, and O'Neill went and grabbed her away from Mitchell _(Mitchell?)_ , and now _he's_ got her. All they need is for Mitchell to track him down and grab her back, and then they can all go round again, playing Capture The Flag with a woman who (apparently) has _no fucking clue what's going on._

_Thanks so much for this, O'Neill. You have no idea how much time and effort I've put into forgetting things._ Kind of amusing, considering present company. Or maybe not.

Because she's the only woman he'll ever love, and he'll love her until the day he dies. He was content (more or less) in loving her without ever seeing her because he realized pretty damned fast that he (O'Neill) was never going to be able to touch her. Which would pretty much blow for Dani, and it wasn't going to be much of a picnic for O'Neill either, when the two of them got around to something more than one kiss in a time-loop and a bunch of cuddling when they thought they were two other people.

But somehow he'd never imagined either of them moving on. _He'd_ had to, but he was the extra. Surplus to requirements. He and Mike are happy enough. Mike's four interests in life are patent law, surfing, sex, and the Lakers, order subject to change at whim. Nielsen has no interest in surfing, basketball isn't his sport, and he leaves the patent law to his very expensive people (none of whom are Mike, since you don't fuck the help, in his last life or this.) Still, they're content with each other. It's not a Great Love. He doesn't want that. He had that.

Or, to be completely accurate (an engineer has to be accurate) that's what O'Neill has, or _had_ , and why in the name of God and all His little kittens has Dani spent the last twelve years off fucking Major (last Nielsen heard) Mitchell? Not that he'd expect his little sweetheart to be faithful to O'Neill (she never has been), but she's never been monogamous in her infidelity either, and she's sure as hell stayed away from the Teams for her recreational sex. Much less nailing her (if he can possibly believe O'Neill) team leader. Of course, he's kept track of O'Neill, too, so he knows about the marriage. Knows O'Neill's in Washington. And while he still can't believe O'Neill would give her up (because he wouldn't have in his place) the real point here is that _she_ wouldn't give _him_ up (it's not hubris, it's fact.) And he won't get any answers out of "Alex Tyler," but on the other hand, that was one hell of a stock tip the Old Man passed along. He goes over to his desk and opens his laptop. Time to do a little judicious revision of his portfolio.

#

Cam spends most of Monday shooting hoops in his office with wadded-up memos. He spends the rest of it drafting his Letter of Resignation. He went through one revision of the Stargate Program. He really isn't interested in sticking around for a second one. He's done his twenty. He's got his pension and a little put by. He'll go on home, take a year to let his nerves settle out, then turn his hand to what needs doing. Maybe get his commercial license and fly some freight. Peace, quiet, and decent money if he picks the right job, and he's always loved to fly. _(Before Antarctica)_ a little voice in the back of his mind reminds him, and he pushes it down deep, along with the anger and the shakes and the knowledge that when those memories would come up to the top (and they did, when SG-1, when his pickup team, got hit with an ice-planet mission, or it was just a bad day and the lock-box memories came up out of nowhere) Jackson was there to hold on to in every way there was. And she isn't now.

In between and around the baskets and the letter and thinking about what he'll do in civilian life, he thinks about what Sam's doing. What everyone else is going to do once the Program goes public. Everybody who can pressure the Oval Office is going to be down on Level 28 heading through the Stargate with a tin cup and an agenda, and the moment one of them comes back in pieces - or doesn't come back at all - whoever sent them is going to be screaming for Earth to declare war. _And good luck with that,_ he thinks. God help them if they piss off the Jaffa. The Jaffa still have the biggest space fleet out there, and _ha'taks_ were designed for planetary bombardment. Most of those guys were trained up under the _Goa'uld_ to destroy worlds. They won't exactly have lost their touch in a decade or so.

The smart thing to do would be to just _get rid of the damned Gate._ Maybe not forever. Just for a while. Until everybody can calm down and get used to the notion. Maybe the IOC would grow some teeth. Or the people who'd be going through could actually get some training. Or ... something. It's too damned bad they can't just take _Archemedes_ and have her beam the Gate off somewhere. But people would just demand it back again.

At the end of the day, he tucks the letter into his desk drawer - he'll turn it over to General Landry in a day or so, get the paperwork started - and goes home. There's a message from Momma on the answering machine time-stamped a couple hours back. Nothing much to it. Just asking him to call. Only Momma never calls unless it's something urgent, so he goes and flips on Sam's toy to check (still in the green) then leaves it on (just in case) while he calls back. What she has to say is short and as far from sweet as it's possible to be.

Skip and Alex and some of the cousins went to Asheville today to do some shopping, because Alex has been down since he left. (Not sulky, Momma says, just quiet in a miserable way.) She went off by herself, and she didn't show up when she was supposed to, and Skip and the others turned the mall inside out for the best part of two hours, then they called Security, then they called Momma, and when Alex'd been missing four hours, Momma called the number Cam left her, and a man answered, and said to tell Cam she was safe and then he hung up. And she'd tried calling back for almost an hour, but hadn't been able to get through again.

"I don't think you'd best call that number again, Momma," Cam says, when he can trust his voice to be steady.

"Cameron Everett Mitchell, do you think I can expect an explanation any day soon?" Momma says, and her voice is heading into storm country.

"No, Momma," Cam says miserably. "I'm sorry. If that man said she's safe, she is."

He talks to Momma a bit more, not about anything in particular, before he hangs up. And after he has, he goes and gets a glass, and the bottle of whiskey, and sits in front of the dark silent television set, and gets very, very drunk.

#

Around about four in the morning, the woman on the couch starts to stir and mutter. Nielsen keeps working. Half an hour after that she's progressed to flailing, and a few minutes after that, he gets across the room just in time to keep her from rolling off the couch.

"Take it easy," he says gently. He sits her up carefully, propping her because she's still groggy. Her eyelids are at half-mast; he picks up the glasses from the table (O'Neill brought them along; have to be hers) and settles them on her nose. She opens her eyes very wide, but even if she's terrified right now (and she probably is) she still won't be tracking very well. He's still got a hand on her, because if he doesn't, she'll fall right over.

"My name is John Nielsen," he says. Slowly. Reassuringly. And there haven't been a lot of times in the last thirteen years when he's either bothered to be reassuring or to try to make sure that the special kids understood him. "I'm a friend. You're safe here." And when the hell has _that_ ever reassured anyone?

She tries to say something. Nothing but garbled noises are coming out. And oh, god, he only saw Dani look this terrified once _(begging him - begging_ O'Neill _\- to leave before the_ ha'tak _blew up, and O'Neill refusing because he'd rather die than leave her...)_ but "Alex Tyler" doesn't look a lot like Dani. It's not the age. It's the mind behind the face.

"It's okay. You've been sedated. It will wear off soon. Don't try to talk."

She does, though. Still stubborn. "Wh- Wh- Whu- _Where?_ " She's panting and coughing with the effort of getting the word out, and he moves from squatting in front of her to sitting beside her on the couch.

"Take it easy. This is my office. You're in Monterey County, near Salinas. In California. I know that the last thing that you remember is being in North Carolina. When you feel a little better, we can talk about it." When she tells him what she remembers.

After another few minutes, she's sitting up by herself. He goes into the kitchenette to get a can of Coke. After a little thought he adds a straw to that order. He has to help her hold the can, but she drinks thirstily.

"Thank you." Her voice, when she speaks, is another shock. High and soft and distinctly Southern. "I'm Alex Tyler." She has to speak carefully, but speech is getting easier.

"John Nielsen," he says again.

"Pleased," she says doubtfully. "I don't know why I'm here," she whispers, and her face crumples, and her eyes fill with tears, and Nielsen silently curses O'Neill with a venom he hasn't felt in years, because he doesn't have any answers for her.

She curls away from him, into the arm of the couch, an awkward ball of utter misery, and all he can do is rescue the Coke can, and go and get the box of Kleenex, and not say anything because he doesn't believe in telling comforting lies. Alex cries with the abandon of a child, but she isn't a child, so she tries to muffle the sounds with her hands, and with wads of tissues, and Nielsen thinks sourly that all those people who keep babbling on in print about 'enchanting child-women' ought to get the chance to meet one, because he thinks Alex Tyler is about as close as you'll get in someone who's (technically) not mentally defective, and there's nothing enchanting about her. She's obviously terrified, and she doesn't have any way to _cope._

It takes her about fifteen minutes to cry herself out. She doesn't move afterward. She just lies there, breath hitching with every breath she takes.

"I know you're scared," Nielsen says. "I know you've lost your memory. I know what it's like not to remember anything."

"Do- Do- Did- Did you get it back?" she asks.

"Yes." _And O'Neill wasn't happy about that, because it meant Jonah couldn't stay with his Carlyn down in the mines, and they were happy there, sweetheart. And what happened to the two of you?_

"Cameron knew how I lost mine," Alex says. She stops abruptly, and Nielsen can hear her struggling not to start crying again. It takes her quite a while to win, but she finally does, and pushes herself to a sitting position, and blows her nose firmly, and scours her eyes with another handful of Kleenex, and then looks around for some place to deposit the whole soggy mess. Nielsen gets up and brings her the wastebasket from beside his drafting table. She scoops them in, using both hands. He's pretty sure he knows what O'Neill hit her up with; her coordination's still going to be a little off for a couple of hours.

"Another Coke?" he asks, and she nods, and he brings it back, grabbing the aspirin on the way, because he's sure she's got a headache by this point. She looks grateful when she sees the bottle, and manages to get it open by herself with only a little struggle. Watching her gives him a good idea of how far along she is to drug-free. She can hold the soda can by herself this time, but the straw is still a good idea. He grabs the chair from behind the drafting table and sits perched on it, regarding her.

"You're an architect?" she asks, looking around.

"Engineer. Giza Engineering Systems. My company."

She nods. She's trying to be polite, because those are the forms you follow when you don't know who you are or where you belong in the world. But she's just about at the end of her rope.

"General O'Neill brought you here so I could take care of you," Nielsen says. He realizes he's framing the truth in simple declarative statements suitable for the child that Alex isn't, but until he's talked to her more than this, he won't have a real idea of how he _should_ talk to her. Much less what to say. _God damn your black soul to hell, Old Man._

"I was at the mall," she says softly. "I went with Skipper and Kitten and Daynee and Booker and Faunt. His name's Fauntleroy, but we can't call him 'Roy' because that's his father's name. His mama almost died having him, so his daddy said she could name him anything she wanted, and, well, by the time she came to her senses it was too late."

"Where's the mall?" Nielsen asks quietly, because he recognizes the symptoms of shock perfectly well.

"It's about ninety minutes from the house, even the way Skip drives, because they live way out in the country, except Cameron says they really don't, only I think they do, because they're right next to a farm, and the road in front of the house is only one and a half lanes wide, but Cameron says it isn't an actual farm road, and he says the Wilkerson place isn't a real farm, either, but I don't know what else you'd call a bunch of cows and empty fields and a barn, and there's just an empty field across from them, too, except Mrs. Mitchell says it's like to be sold up for tract housing and that would be a scandal and a shame, because it's a hundred acre parcel, and you know what that means: two hundred ticky-box houses sure, and taxes going sky-high."

Her voice is perfectly even, and perfectly reasonable (as if he ought to know exactly what she's talking about) and he has _no fucking idea,_ but he _does_ know that she was at home with Cameron Mitchell's dear mother, and based on this information alone, he could probably find the house. "So you went to the mall," he says. Prompting her.

"I needed some clothes. Cam, Cameron, he left money for my keep, I guess. He had to go back to his job. He's in the Air Force, in Colorado Springs." She stops and blinks at him, and seems to notice him for the first time. "General O'Neill?" she asks, and suddenly she sounds a lot more alert.

"He brought you here," Nielsen says, wondering what's coming. Hysterics? More tears?

"No," she says, frowning. "That's not right. He came to see Cameron, the week before he ... left." She takes a deep breath. "He was supposed to stay another four days, but he left early. He had a month's leave." The wandering pronoun is a little confusing, but Nielsen manages to follow it. "He only stayed a couple of hours. He didn't talk much to Cameron at all." She looks up at him, and her eyes are suddenly frightened all over again. "I don't remember coming here. Mr. Nielsen, did I forget again?"

"No. No, Alex, you didn't forget anything. You saw General O'Neill again yesterday at the mall. He gave you something to make you sleep, and he brought you here. He said you might not remember seeing him because of it. You might remember later," he adds, because she's looking absolutely panic-stricken.

"But Cam, he won't know where I am! I have to go back!"

She tries to jump to her feet, but it's too soon. He's a beat too slow to stop her; when he gets there she's already going down. She clutches at him instinctively. As he drags her to her feet her body is pressed against his for just a moment; he can smell the scent of her cologne - some faint lilac floral - and for just an instant it turns to the scent of cinnamon and musk in his memory - _"Don't tell me you have any interest in taking her to bed"_ \- and he dumps her back onto the couch with more force than is either necessary or charitable and steps away, turning his back. "You can't go back. And Mitchell can't know where you are. You weren't safe where you were. That's why O'Neill brought you here."

"Cameron wouldn't tell," she says, sounding bewildered.

"Everybody talks," Nielsen says grimly.

"Who _are_ you?" Alex asks in horror. "Who am I?"

Nielsen laughs. He really can't not. Thirteen years of relative peace, and Jack O'Neill walks back into his life to hand him a live grenade. "Sweetheart, trust me. You do _not_ want an answer to that question. I have it on the best authority."

"Whose?" she asks, after a long pause.

"Who else's? Yours."

#

Cam spends Tuesday thinking, and shooting more baskets. There's quite a pile of paper wads on the floor at the end of the day, but his desk is really clean. He doesn't turn in his resignation letter. When he gets home, there's nothing on the news (yet) about the Stargate Program.

Wednesday morning he signs in to the Mountain extra early and goes down to the Armory to sign out a zat. "Didn't know you were going offworld today, Colonel," Sgt Morgan says idly.

"Oh, I'm not," Cam says easily. "Just got a new idea I want to try out."

"Let me know how it works out," Sgt. Morgan says. Cam smiles and gives him a half-wave.

When he's got the zat, he goes down to the Control Room. He zats the two SFs on guard duty outside the door, then steps over them and seals the door from inside (Senior Staff Override.) He zats the locking mechanism for good measure, then both the control techs, then locks up the other door. Then he turns the zat on the computers.

It took folks fifteen years to jigger the first dialing interface for the Stargate, with Sam kicking their asses for the last couple. She spent another ten years tweaking everything about it on just about a daily basis. They could replace it with a DHD, but they don't have one, and a DHD won't give them the security checks and overrides and backup systems they're used to, so they'll want another dialing computer, and that's going to take them a couple of years to put into place.

By the time they get the knockout gas into the vents, his job is done.

#

"I don't believe you," Alex says, but the combination of drugs and hysterics have left her calmer than she might be under other circumstances. "I told you I didn't want to know who I am?"

"In a manner of speaking."

"I want to go home," she says, wrapping her arms around herself and hunching forward.

"Alex Tyler doesn't have one," Nielsen says brutally. Any more than John Nielsen did, back in the day. Castoffs don't, and he can't quite make up his mind whether to think of Alex as Dani's castoff _(but Dani wasn't even willing to kick_ him _to the curb, that's why O'Neill had to do it behind her back)_ or as Dani herself in a clever plastic disguise. Needs more study.

"Cameron never did want me, did he?" she says, and in that moment she sounds even older than the calendar age of the woman she used to be. Nielsen has no idea what Dani thought of Mitchell, but Alex obviously thinks she's in love with him.

"He was willing to risk his life and his family's safety to see you safe," Nielsen says, more gently now. "The best way to repay him is to vanish."

"I am so _damned_ tired," she says wearily. From the emphasis she puts on the word, it sounds as if it's the worst one she knows, and Nielsen remembers (they're O'Neill's memories, and he _really_ doesn't appreciate having them recalled to life so vividly after all these years) Dani swearing a mile-wide blue streak. Not in English (not in O'Neill's hearing) but she never managed to remember the languages he had at least a smattering of fluency in. And O'Neill had entertained himself (once upon a time) by teaching her to swear in Spanish...

"Let me take you home," he says. "Things will look better later." He'd been going to say 'in the morning,' but it's that now. Dawn's coming up; Mike will probably be out catching the early surf at one of the beaches along the coast. One of the advantages to a rich self-indulgent lifestyle.

"Don't have one," she mumbles. Fading fast.

"Mine," he says. "You can stay as long as you want."

"Mr. Nielsen-" she begins.

"John," he corrects.

"Alex Tyler, it isn't my actual name, is it?"

"No. No, it isn't."

She leans over even further, and when she speaks, she's mumbling so much it's hard to make out the words. But he can. "And you know, and Cameron knows, and General O'Neill knows who I really am. And you won't tell me."

_God damn you, you sick bastard._ "I'm sorry, Alex."

#

"We're bringing home nymphets now, Johnny?"

"Fuck off, Mike. And don't call me 'Johnny.'" He pulls the pillow over his head. No use. Mike simply pulls it off again.

"It's noon. The beautiful people have been up for hours. Sun, sand, surf."

"The beautiful people just got to bed about four hours ago," Nielsen mutters. "And if you get sand in my bed I am going to kill you."

"I showered. Then I saw that the guest room door was closed. So I opened it, and saw the nymphet."

"You didn't wake her up?" Nielsen gives up and rolls over. Mike, having achieved his objective, plasters his impressive naked sun-warmed body against Nielsen's.

"From the looks of things, she isn't going to wake up until the next big quake. Maybe not even then. So what's the story?"

"Family friend on the run from the Mob."

"She need a lawyer?"

"Because this is obviously a case of patent infringement?"

"Hey, I do referrals."

"Fuck you, Tedesco."

"We'll get to that, Nielsen."

#

He wakes up in Secured Medical over in the Academy Hospital, which is kind of annoying. He's got a headache and his mouth tastes like shit, which is _really_ annoying. He's also strapped to the bed, which, well, kind of falls between the two. So he has to yell until somebody shows up. "Hey," he says, when the orderly shows up, "think you might see your way clear to unstrapping a guy from the bed here?"

"Do you know where you are?" the orderly asks warily. The name-plate on his shirt says "Chalmers."

"Well, I'm gonna take a wild guess and say High Security Medical Wing of the Academy Hospital? Bars on the windows kinda give it away."

"Do you know why you're here?"

"Actually, I'm kinda puzzled there. I was sorta figuring, you know, security cell. But hey. I figure somebody here'll get around to telling me sooner or later." They stare at each other for a moment. "Not gonna unstrap me?" Cam asks.

"I'll get Dr. MacKenzie," the orderly says.

About twenty minutes later, MacKenzie shows up, clipboard in hand, and two burly orderlies behind him, which Cam takes as a good sign, since nobody brings that much muscle along to tell a guy they _aren't_ going to unstrap him from the bed.

"Colonel Mitchell. How are you feeling?"

"Oh, kind of a headache. A little thirsty. Probably the aftereffects of the knockout gas. You know how it is."

"Frances said that you know where you are. That's very good. But he says you aren't sure why you're here."

"Yeah. You see, Doc, last I heard, shooting up government property wasn't a psychiatric disorder."

"So you remember what you did?" MacKenzie asks.

"Oh, sure. Got up, showered, shaved, drove to the Mountain, had breakfast, went to my office, checked my email, went to the Armory, signed out a zat, went down to the Control Room, locked myself in, destroyed the Dialing Computers."

"And why did you do that?" Dr. MacKenzie asks.

"You're going to have to be more specific than that," Cam says reprovingly. "I signed out a zat because I needed one - it's a non-lethal weapon, but it's hell on machinery. I locked myself into the Control Room because if I hadn't, I'm pretty sure people would have stopped me before I was done, and I destroyed the Dialing Computers so we can't use our Stargate. We don't have any teams offworld right now, and _Archemedes_ is in orbit to run errands and messages between Earth and our offworld bases, so I wasn't really discommoding anybody. I figure they'll have a new interface in place in - oh, two, three years. Oh hell. I forgot. Program's going public, isn't it? No more black budget funding. Congress is going to have to vote the money. Might take longer then."

"You don't feel we should have a Stargate Program any longer, Colonel?" MacKenzie asks. Cam thinks he sounds a little sandbagged. "Is this related to Dr. Jackson's disappearance?"

"Well, it's kind of complicated," Cam says. "But would you mind unstrapping me from this bed? Lotta coffee at breakfast. Oh, and maybe a couple of aspirin?" MacKenzie motions the interns forward. They unstrap Cam, and he sits up and stretches. "Yeah. That's a lot better. Oh, and one more thing?"

"What is it, Colonel?"

"Could you call over to the Mountain and have somebody go on down to my office? There's a letter on top of my desk for General Landry. He's gonna love it."

"Why is that, Colonel?" MacKenzie asks, and the man really does sound suspicious.

"I've been giving the matter a lot of thought over the last month, Doctor, with the Program going public and everything, and now with Dr. Jackson not being here anymore, and I've decided it's time to resign my commission and return to civilian life."

#

It's really annoying that General Landry seems to like him better now that he thinks he's gone crazy, Cam thinks. _Finally_ gone crazy, and Cam wonders who's collected on the betting pool he knows was started the day (twelve years ago) that he first set foot in the Mountain.

But he's gotten aspirin, and coffee, and a really lousy lunch, and they aren't strapping him to the bed again (which is a plus), and he's lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to assign this place a ranking in the hierarchy of Prison Cells he Has Known and (not) Loved, when General Landry comes in.

"Sir," Cam says, getting to his feet.

"At ease, son," Landry says. "I came to see how you were getting on."

"Not really happy about being in the loony bin," Cam says. "I was kind of figuring that, oh, you'd throw me in detention, I'd explain my reasoning, we'd work our way around from there - and yes, sir, I am fully aware that what I did involves destruction of government property, assault on non-commissioned officers, misappropriation of government property for personal use, all of which carry fines and prison time at the discretion of the base commander and can involve the convening of a tribunal of general or special courts-martial at the discretion of my commanding officer. But I really am serious about resigning, you know."

"Colonel Mitchell," General Landry says. He stares at the walls for several seconds, and out the window, and at the floor, before looking back at Cam. "Colonel Mitchell. Did you kill Dr. Jackson?"

_"Jesus Fucking Christ!"_ Cam's response is heartfelt and unfeigned. He takes a deep breath. "Sir. No, sir. I did not kill Dr. Jackson. I have no idea on God's Earth where she is, but as far as I know, she's alive." He looks at Landry, who's looking a little stunned. "Sir, I, uh, didn't mean to-" Cam's sure that Momma would smack him if she were here; cursing is one thing, blasphemy is something completely different, and Cam apologizes in his heart for taking the Lord's name in vain.

"It's all right, Colonel. I've been in the service since before you were born; this isn't the first time I've heard words like that. And I know how close the two of you were, and not knowing ... that's the worst. Ours is a high-stress profession. You've been on the front lines for a very long time, Colonel. There's no shame in this - we've both seen it happen before. If anyone should be blamed, it's me, for not seeing the stress you were under. I promise you, I'll do my best to see that no charges are brought against you. You just do your best to cooperate with Dr. MacKenzie so you can be out of here as soon as possible and home to your family."

MacKenzie thinks he's crazy. Okay, that's his job. MacKenzie thinks _everybody's_ crazy. But apparently _General Landry_ thinks he's crazy, too, and Cam doesn't like that very much. "I'm sorry, sir. I don't quite understand. I'm in here - and I don't get to resign my commission and separate - because everybody thinks I've flipped my lid?"

"In my daddy's day they called it battle fatigue," Landry says. "I'm sure you're familiar with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Colonel. It happens. Nothing to be ashamed of. You've done more for your country - for the planet - than most of the people I could name. We'll send you home safe and sound."

And it ought to be a heartwarming speech, but after Landry leaves, Cam just feels like _kicking_ something.

#

He's had O'Neill's surprise package for two weeks now, and Nielsen thinks that not only does he want to shoot O'Neill (he _always_ wants to shoot O'Neill, just on general principles, nobody knows better than Nielsen does that the man needs shooting), but he's decided to expand his horizons. He's going to shoot Cameron Mitchell, too. Because Cameron Mitchell ( _Colonel_ Cameron Mitchell) is apparently a combination of Lancelot du Lac and Superman. He is handsome, courtly, brilliant, kind, noble, brave (clean, reverent, brave, true...) considerate, and _has a terrific car._ He also apparently has an amazing apartment (and the place Alex describes sounds oddly familiar to Nielsen, and not like Colonel Mitchell's apartment. Funny thing that.)

The news about the Stargate is already starting to trickle out, and he's made more than enough money off his advance notice to bankroll Alex until the end of time. It's too bad that what she wants, money can't buy. She wants a pair of ruby slippers.

He wants some answers.

Not from Alex. Forty-eight hours after she woke up, he had every answer Alex had in her possession. More than enough to start him worrying. Because Dargol is supposed to be the ultimate brain-scrubber, offering the happy side-effect of a Fountain of Youth into the bargain. Administer the antidote, and you keep the youth and lose your amnesia; he's sure that there's been exhaustive testing of both in the last seventeen years, because who wouldn't want eternal youth? One injection, and another injection a few hours later, and you get a whole Do-Over. Assuming, of course, that there aren't any long-term side-effects. The SGC didn't have the time, the money, or the mandate (back in the day) to set up a long-term research project on Vyus. He wonders if they did later. All O'Neill remembers at the time is planetary amnesia and Linea. But that had been a bitch of a year. Ma'chello's toys drove Dani crazy. Aris Boch. Satan Part One executing Teal'c temporarily. Going to an alternate universe (second time.) Going to Netu (Satan Part Two.) Going to Edora. The NID Black Operation. Having the SGC overrun by alien lobsters. The whole thing with the crystal skull and Dani's grandfather. The only bright spot in the whole damned year was getting Skaara back and taking him home, and O'Neill had been almost sure that Dani was going to stay too. So the technical details are a little vague now (not that they were ever O'Neill's business), and that doesn't do Nielsen a lot of good now.

He's not sure what Dani wanted to forget, but Alex remembers one hell of a lot more than he thinks she should. When she tells him she knows 'a lot' of foreign languages, he tries her on all the ones he knows. She can prattle back at him in Spanish, Russian, German, Farsi, the Polish he's dredged up out of childhood memories and polished in the Engineering bullpen (Maria Nowak has refused for so long to believe that the entire world isn't Polish-speaking that he's had to learn it in self-defense)...

And _Goa'uld_.

She's fluent, but she has no idea what language it is. "Is that Klingon?" she asks, wrinkling her nose at him in distaste. "Cameron said some of that to me, too. But, um, you're accent's better." She thinks for a moment. "There doesn't seem to be anything _polite_ you can say in it."

"Not really. No."

She can operate a computer. She can drive a car. She (still) can't cook. She can read in every language he can find a book in (he can't write _Goa'uld_ , or he'd try her in that.) She can translate hieroglyphs and every dead language he can find ditto (says she can, anyway, and he doubts it would occur to her to lie.) He takes her down to the target range and puts a gun in her hand, and she knows exactly what to do with it. Better (a lot better) than the last time he remembers. Dani held an Intermediate rating in Unarmed Combat, but he's not going to test whether Alex remembers that. It's a good way to get yourself killed.

And a little over a month before her arrival FOB his life, she woke up in what she was told was Colonel Cameron Mitchell's apartment, naked in Colonel Cameron Mitchell's bed, and Colonel Cameron Mitchell (the noble and stainless exemplar of all that is desirable in military manhood) told her that her name was Alex Tyler, that she was 22, an orphan, an only child, and he was taking her home to mother. (He also told her that she was born in Alexandria, Virginia - hence her name - which Nielsen thinks was a charming touch.) Alex spent the next three weeks trying to get the morally-upright Colonel Mitchell to have sex with her (reading between the lines) and then he left, and ten days after that, O'Neill (who'd already been by for a visit once) dropped by again, and plucked her from the bosom of the Mitchell clan and dumped her here to keep her out of the hands of the NID, who are looking for Dani for the obvious reasons. You don't just walk away after twenty years on the most top secret project there is, especially on the eve of it going semi-public, and expect to _walk away._.

With a little more prodding (and a couple of glasses of wine) Alex volunteers the information that the sainted Colonel Cameron Mitchell of blessed memory didn't want to sleep with her because he was in love with 'that Danielle Jackson woman.' Something that, apparently, 'everybody knows,' and the thought that 'everybody knows' it is enough to make Nielsen's blood run cold. Alex shouldn't even know Dani's _name._ The pedigree she offers up for her information is labyrinthine, but Nielsen memorizes the names. Then (on Day Four of what he's starting to suspect is a custom-tailored Purgatory) he fires off a blistering email to the Old Man. It goes through half-a-dozen cut-outs at his end, and it will go through the same number at the other: it's for emergencies only. Nielsen thinks this qualifies. And he gives O'Neill chapter and verse - what Alex remembers, what 'everybody knows' - and asks him the question of the hour: _why did she do it?_

He gets back a really short reply.

_When I figure out why amnesia is better than suicide, I'll let you know._

Cold bastard. Another thing that doesn't make sense. This is _Dani._

He buys her a wardrobe and a computer, and once he's paper-tripped her (it takes him about a week, and when he asks her if she wants to choose a middle name for her paperwork she chooses 'Cameron', no goddamned surprises there) he buys her a car.

Mike watches all of this with amusement. He likes Alex (Mike likes everyone, it's one of his most annoying qualities), although she nearly killed him the first time they met (with her conscious; she'd slept the clock around the day he'd brought her home.)

#

She and Nielsen had been sitting in the living room. He'd been on his laptop, watching what the markets were doing. Alex had been staring at the television - 80 inch plasma - remote in hand, surfing her way through 500 channels. He hadn't known yet that she could follow every word on the Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Arabic, and Vietnamese stations. And Mike had come in from the carport - armloads of groceries - and put them away, and walked into the living room, and leaned down, and kissed him. Right in front of Alex. (Hardest adjustment to the 21st century that Nielsen's had to make, really. Harder than boys who do boys, is boys who do boys _in public.)_

And Alex had stared at them, eyes very round, and said: "Oh! You're _gay!_ " Not disapproving. More as if she were making a necessary announcement for the benefit of invisible spectators.

Mike had straightened up and stared at her blankly (Mike was born in 1986, a couple of years before Nielsen's documents say he was.) "Is that a problem?" he'd asked.

And she'd said, "Oh, no! My heart's in the _grave!_ " And Mike had laughed until he'd had to sit down on the floor while Alex fluttered around him and demanded that Nielsen bring the poor man a glass of water.

And he'd cooked them all dinner, and Alex had said it was delicious, and said that she couldn't say what she'd normally say, but it was lovely, really. And Mike teased her until she admitted that the usual thing would be to tell the cook that they'd make 'some _person_ an excellent _spouse,_ ' and so Mike told her all about the marriage laws in the State of California, and Alex looked fascinated.

#

She plays chess against both of them, and beats them consistently. It doesn't make her happy, and Nielsen knows why. The list of things she knows about herself keeps getting longer, and it doesn't add up.

Nielsen doesn't trust the Old Man farther than he can throw a _Goa'uld_ mothership, but he respects his guile. He still hires the best private security company on the market (they call themselves 'private security,' but they're a little closer to being high-tech mercenaries) to look for anyone who might be looking for Alex Tyler. So far, nothing.

He doesn't risk having them backtrail Danielle Jackson. Not with Alex to protect.

#

"I should get a life," she says seriously. Day Fifteen of her residency. Day Fifty-Eight of her _life._

She's sitting on his floor, staring into the fire. Okay, it's only September in _California,_ but it's the coast, and the nights are damp and raw, and Nielsen likes fires. Mike's in the City (meaning San Francisco) and will be for the rest of the week. Alex is good about pretending she doesn't talk about anything personal around him because she's 'on the run from the Mob,' and Mike really doesn't give a rat's ass.

"Anything you want," he says, and means it. There's plenty of money, and once she decides, they can either come up with a plausible high school transcript or just buy her way in to the college of her choice. If she even needs that.

"I don't know what I want," she says. She smiles, glancing up at him. "I do, but I can't get it."

"What, Mitchell?" It's a fairly obvious guess, since half her conversation consists of 'Cameron said,' and 'Cameron thought,' and 'When Cameron and I,' and Nielsen really doesn't believe that _anyone_ can be that perfect, especially somebody who survived twelve years at the SGC.

"Cameron don't want me. No sense cryin' for the moon, John. No." She goes back to staring into the fire.

She is sweet and innocent and desperately wants someone to love. She _does_ love someone, and that someone is Colonel Cameron Mitchell, and she knows he doesn't love her, and that's making her almost as miserable as not knowing who she really is. She knows that Nielsen knows, but she won't ask him; she's got her pride. She just looks at him sometimes and _wishes,_ and if he actually had a heart, the look in her eyes would melt it. If it were Dani sitting there, he might not be able to hold out in the name of 'for your own good,' but he knows something O'Neill decided not to remember; something Mitchell probably never knew. Bodies don't define you. Memories do. When he thought he was the only one there was, before he knew he was the _copy,_ even though his body was fifteen, it didn't matter. He _was_ O'Neill, because those were the memories he carried. And now, thirteen years later, his memories are different enough from O'Neill's that _he's_ different. He's not O'Neill, and god knows Alex isn't Danielle Jackson.

She could be, though. Again.

"You want to know who you ... were," he says.

She sighs. "Well, ain't nobody gonna tell me that either, John, and if wishes were horses. I just want to know ... why I forgot. How I forgot."

The accent still manages to surprise him. She must have picked it up at Mitchell's house. Dani always had an ear for accents. "I don't know why. I know it was deliberate. Something you chose. Because I know how."

"Please don't tease me," she says with quiet dignity.

"I'm not. There's a drug. If you take it, you lose your memories. Not the things you've learned. Just the things that have happened to you."

"Because there's two kinds of memory, stored in two different parts of the brain, in two different ways," she says, and of course she would have looked for everything she could get her hands on about amnesia and memory loss. "Only there isn't any kind of drug like that."

"Yes there is. It's classified. Experimental. But it exists."

She turns around and looks at him, and her eyes are wide and he can see the wheels turning in her mind. "Cameron got it for me. Oh my _Lord._ That's why he's in trouble. He stole it for me. And then ... he stole _me_."

It's close enough to what's probably the truth, and Nielsen doesn't know the actual truth anyway.

"And ... General O'Neill found out. And he didn't arrest him. General O'Neill said he was Cam's boss. And he brought me here to protect Cam. Are _you_ going to be in trouble now, John?"

He laughs. "Me? I got out of the game a long time ago, Alex. That's why you're here with me."

"I was in _college!_ " she says in frustration. "I have to have been. Or... just out? I'm twenty-two. I've looked in the mirror - at least that's true. But ... when did I learn all those languages? Where did I learn to shoot a gun?" She pulls off her glasses and rubs her eyes fiercely. "What the _damn-hell_ could I have to forget?"

She isn't asking him, so he doesn't answer. He doesn't _have_ an answer. He can think of half a dozen times without even trying that O'Neill lost his memories, that Dani lost hers, and they both moved Heaven and Earth to get them back.

He thinks they're probably done with deep conversations for the evening - she knows there are landmines there and she won't push, and she's just been handed more information than she's gotten in the last month and a half of her existence. It will take some time to settle. But she surprises him.

"You knew her, didn't you? The other me?"

And the most absolutely-accurate answer is 'no', because _he_ only knew Dani for about a week before O'Neill hustled him into anonymity. But it isn't the truth he believes when he looks at her _(because she isn't Dani, but she used to be.)_ "Yes," he says.

She gets quickly to her feet. "Excuse me," she says, and walks quickly out of the room. A few minutes later he hears a door close.

#

They don't talk about it. She's still asleep when he gets up and goes out the next morning. When he comes back, her car's gone. She gets back late, and goes straight to her room. Next day, it's out again. Driving. She's got credit cards and a checking account now (and a passport, for that matter); she could go anywhere she wants. He's not her jailer. But she's there when he comes home that night, sitting in the dining room, eating Chinese food out of the cartons with chopsticks.

"I got you some," she says. "It's in the fridge."

"Thanks," he says. He fixes himself a plate - she knew what to get, what he likes, because he declared Take Out Night a week ago, and you never have to say anything twice around Alex - and microwaves it before bringing it to the table.

"You're going to have to help me," she says seriously, once he's done with his food. He could tell from her expression something was coming; Alex is as transparent as a plate glass window. He raises his eyebrows. "You have to keep me from making any mistakes."

_You're barking up the wrong tree here, sweetheart._ "Alex-"

"I needed to not be ... her," she says. "And Cameron risked an awful lot for me. And there's bad people looking for me. And I can't just sit in your guest room for the rest of my life. But if I'm going to make my way in the world, you've got to help me keep from making mistakes. Because..." She stops and looks down at her hands. "I won't ask you. Cameron wouldn't tell me, when I- And I trust him. He'd do the right thing. So I guess I don't ever get to..." She stops again. "But you've got to keep me from going to the wrong places."

"Yeah, you're going to have to be a little clearer than that," he says.

"Well, you know, I thought maybe I could join the Air Force..." Her voice trails off as she studies his face.

"No. That really wouldn't be a good idea."

"Not any branch of the military?" she asks, and he shakes his head.

"Alex, what do you _want_ to do with your life?" Whatever she picks, she can't choose anything that requires a security clearance. She doesn't have a past, and she doesn't have a memory, and he's not sure she could learn to lie convincingly if she lives to be a hundred.

"You're supposed to know, aren't you?" she says softly. "When you're my age?"

"Alex, it's not as if you have to go out and work for a living." It isn't as if he can't afford a pet. She doesn't eat much.

"Oh, sure. I can just drive around California for the rest of my life. John, that's no way to live. I must have used to do something. Or been _going_ to do something. I can read Ancient Egyptian, for heavens' sake! So maybe ... I should become an archaeologist?"

"No." He's pretty sure that if Alex Tyler takes up a career in archaeology, somebody's going to draw a connection - eventually - between her and Dani Jackson. They look alike, except for the age difference. For all he knows, Alex will come up with the same theories that Dani did. And with the Program going public, sooner or later whoever's running it will be prospecting for people fluent in Middle Eastern languages. And they'll probably recruit Alex. And they'll find out that they don't need to teach Alex Tyler _Goa'uld_ , because she already knows it.

"Yeah," she says. "Okay." She gets up from the table and takes her trash into the kitchen, and walks from there to her room. Something about the way she moves makes him follow her.

Sometime in the last six or seven days (since she got used to having a car of her own, since she found out where the nearest shopping mall was), she's bought herself a suitcase. It's open on the bed now. She's packing.

"This is sudden," he says.

"You don't mind I keep the car and the credit cards and all for a while yet? I won't run the cards up any too much, I promise."

"That's my accountant's problem. I told you. There's plenty of money. You planning a trip?"

"Not so much," she says, and her eyes are brimming with tears that she won't let fall.

And all of a sudden he knows - _he knows_ \- the trip she's planning to take. He reaches out and grabs her wrist, pulling her to a stop. "Alex, this isn't the answer."

"Simpler for ever'one," she says. "Cameron won't ever know. He don't know where I even am. Better'n you having to look over your shoulder the rest of your life. And you don't know me. You knew _her._ You won't even miss me." She pulls her wrist out of his grasp, and he doesn't resist. "She must have done something horrible," Alex whispers, turning away.

Parts of what she's just said are too close to the truth for him to be comfortable hearing them from her. "Do you want to know who she was?" Nielsen says roughly. "Who you ... were? Why you can't study archaeology - or anthropology - or linguistics - or join the military - and I know who we have to thank for putting _that_ idiotic notion into your head - or take any government job at all? You weren't horrible. You were… one of the greatest heroes this planet has ever seen. And I wish to god you could tell me why you did this."

She's staring at him, glasses pushed up on the top of her head, wiping her eyes with the heels of her hands. "You aren't going to tell me," she says raggedly.

"Watch me," Nielsen snarls. He's angry with Alex, but he's _furious_ with O'Neill, and he's not that happy with himself either just now.

"But Cam-"

"And I am sick and tired of hearing about Colonel Mitchell! If he'd done his job - if he'd _protected_ you, sweetheart - you wouldn't be here now! This is a hell of a thing to do to the woman he supposedly loves - or to let her do to herself."

"He doesn't love me," Alex says, looking angry and hurt. "He loves-"

"Danielle Jackson." Nielsen steps forward and takes her by the shoulders and spins her around until she's facing the dresser mirror. "Meet Danielle Jackson, Alex. She's you."

She stares at her reflection for a moment in shock, then starts to struggle, but he doesn't let go. "No! It's not true!"

"You wanted the truth."

_"It's not true! It isn't! I looked her up!_ When Skipper told me who he was in love with I looked her up! I saw a picture! _She's Cameron's age!_ "

He lets go abruptly and she stumbles forward, catching herself against the dresser. Her glasses go sliding off and hit the top with a thud. He isn't expecting her to spin around and slap him. It stings, but she hits … like a girl.

Dani would have taken his head off. "You get _one,_ " he says.

She stares at him, horrified, hands over her mouth. Shaking her head just a little and obviously not quite ready to make up her mind whether to start crying in earnest or apologize or just crawl under the bed. It's an improvement on suicidal.

"How were you planning to do it?" he asks. "You don't have a gun. You don't have a home address, so you couldn't buy one. Nothing over the counter would be fatal. Hanging's more difficult than it looks. Jump off a bridge?"

"Razor," she whispers through her fingers. Her eyes are wide and shocked.

"Slashing your wrists is a method of negotiation, not a method of suicide," Nielsen says dismissively.

"Carotid," she whispers.

She'd lose consciousness in under two minutes, bleed out in six. Even if she didn't manage to make a deep cut, the force of the bleeding would almost certainly tear the incision wider. And even if she _did_ change her mind, by the time help was on the scene - if she actually managed to get any - it would be too late.

"Good plan," he says. "A little hard on the maid, though." Wherever she did it would look like a slaughterhouse.

"Beach," she says, and he really doesn't like the fact that she's put enough thought into all of this to come up with not only a method that would work, but a location that would cause the least _trouble_ to people. This is not something she's come up with between tossing the last of her dim sum and coming in here to pack.

"Most suicides don't take luggage," he points out.

"I wasn't going to tell you," she says, and her voice is unsteady, and she's losing the battle for composure, and she runs for the bathroom, colliding with the doorframe because she's crying too hard to see.

He hears the water in the sink start, and then the shower start. He doubts she's taking a shower; he thinks she's going for white noise. He unpacks her suitcase back into the drawers and the closet, and puts the suitcase away. He made twelve million dollars off the stock tip that came with her, and he's told her there's plenty of money, and she _still_ shops at Sears. When he's done, he sits on the bed. Waiting.

It's forty-five minutes before she comes out again, wearing a pink chenille robe that Dani would have set fire to before allowing it to get within ten feet of her. Looks like she decided on a shower after all.

"You're still here," she says.

"We haven't finished our conversation."

"I don't want to talk about this any more."

"Too bad. Come on. And let's let Colonel Mitchell rest in peace, all right? He's had a busy day."

He ushers her into his office. He opens his laptop, surfs around a bit until he finds the page he's looking for. A promotional picture and bio from about eight years back. Dr. Danielle Jackson. New advances in linguistic analysis of deep-space telemetry. She'd probably been doing something to shore up her cover story, or to cover up something else.

"All right. Alex. Look at the picture."

"I've seen it," she says. Exhausted. Unhappy. Ashamed. He doesn't give a damn.

" _Look_ at it."

"She looks like me," Alex says in a small voice. It's not enough proof, though. She could be Dani's daughter. At least that's what she'll think.

"Let's see what else we can find."

It takes him more than an hour of searching, but he hits paydirt: somebody scanned in the 1995 University of California at Berkeley yearbook, and her picture is in it. The 22-year-old picture is small and grainy and blurred.

But it's recognizably Alex.

And the name underneath is Danielle Jackson.

"I'm twenty-two," Alex says plaintively.

"No," Nielsen says. "I'm sorry."

"Why are you doing this to me?" she asks. She's staring at the screen. "I don't believe this. I can't." Her voice tells him otherwise.

"I can't keep you alive any other way. I can't keep telling you what you can and can't do and not tell you why. It isn't working. Everybody in the government is looking for you. I know why: you were doing classified work for the last twenty years and you don't just walk away from that and vanish. What I don't know is why you took a drug that you knew would destroy ... you."

And he finds it irritating that Alex won't fight harder for her own life, but he actually understands it. At least he'd had someone else's past to build on when he'd started the process of becoming John Nielsen, and he'd known where he'd started from, and why. Even Jonah - in the mines - had scraps of fake memories, and people all around him in the same boat. Alex has nothing except the knowledge that she's _in_ danger and _a_ danger and that nobody particularly wants her at all. He knows there isn't anybody else the Old Man could have trusted, but it's too damned bad he couldn't have stashed her with somebody who could love her and make her love them back. It really wouldn't take much.

Alex shivers, hugging herself tightly. "Please don't say it like that."

"It's the truth."

"It made me look like this too?"

"Yes."

"There aren't any drugs like that."

"Classified. Experimental. And you stole it."

"Me? Not him?"

"We can't really call him up and ask," Nielsen says.

She's silent for almost twenty minutes, staring at nothing. "Well, that explains what I was doing naked in his bed," she says finally. He hadn't thought that Alex could sound so bitter. "You've given me a lot to think about, John," she says, and the effort she's making to remember her manners, even at a time like this, makes him hurt for Alex Tyler. "I appreciate your honesty." She gets to her feet and walks off.

When he leaves in the morning he goes into her room and takes her keys - house and car - and her wallet. He hates the notion of being her jailer (it's annoying and tedious, just to begin with) but he's almost sure that Alex's sense of fair play will keep him from coming home to a dead body on the floor. He phones the house at noon, at six, and at eight (crises at the office) and she doesn't answer the phone, though, which makes him wonder if he's guessed wrong. But when he gets home at ten, she's asleep.

When Mike gets back from SF two days later, he asks Nielsen who shot Alex's dog. Nielsen says she got bad news from home. Mike doesn't pry (Mike also doesn't really give a flying fuck; that's one of his charms.) Alex comes out of her room exactly long enough to say hello to Mike and goes back in again. She's apparently found a career she wants to pursue, and it's sleeping, because she's got to be clocking a solid eighteen hours a day of rack-time, and if she's coming out at all, it's when she's sure there's nobody else in the house.

She'd been annoyingly (determinedly) cheerful and she'd babbled like a brook and he'd heard enough about Colonel Cameron Mitchell to last him _for the rest of his life_ and it had been like living with a combination of Pollyanna and a Golden Retriever puppy. She'd been determined to make her own way in the world and _not be a problem for anyone_ , and she didn't know why she didn't remember anything, or why people kept moving her from place to place and hiding her, or why they wouldn't tell her who she was when they obviously knew, but she'd managed to figure out enough to decide that killing herself would be the best thing, the _safest_ thing, for everyone else. Especially since her current jailer (one John J. Nielsen, Esq.) couldn't plan out a future for her that wouldn't land her right back in the hands of the NID.

And he'd thought that telling her 'who' and 'what' and 'how' would at least give her something to hold on to. But he has to say that's pretty much been a dead loss. After ten days with no change (Day Seventy of life as Alex Tyler, and it's pretty clear she thinks that's about sixty-nine days too many) he takes a pause for some serious soul-searching (which takes about two seconds, since O'Neill sold his soul decades ago, and you can't clone something that isn't there) and drives home in the middle of the day. He walks into Alex's room and opens the curtains. It's two in the afternoon, but she's in bed. He opens the windows. It's one of the days that actually makes you glad you're living in this postmodern toxic hellpit.

"Wakey wakey," he says, stripping the covers out of her grasp. She's not asleep, since she's trying to pull them up over her head. He whips them down to the foot of the bed, exposing Alex's pink cotton 'Hello Kitty' pajamas (Alex will sleep naked about the time Hell freezes over.) She attempts to curl up into a ball, and grabs for the pillow, but he's faster than she is, and it joins the bedclothes on the floor. "When was the last time you were out of this room?"

"I don't care," she says, sitting up.

"Tsk," he answers. "What would Mitchell say?"

That gets her to open her eyes. "He'd say his girlfriend committed suicide and he doesn't give a good goddamn about me," she says, enunciating slowly and carefully.

Ouch. It's the truth, but he's not sure he's ready for Alex without her rose-colored glasses. It's a little too much like seeing somebody's pet dog after it's been abused and abandoned. "Yeah, well, Dani tended to die a lot. It wasn't ever permanent. It doesn't have to be this time, either."

It takes about thirty seconds for what he's said to sink in. "I... I can have my memories back?" she asks warily.

"Get up, get dressed, we'll discuss it." O'Neill's going to want his balls. He'll just hope Dani will intercede for him. Or, hey, maybe Mitchell. There's a thought.

He walks out.

#

She's up and dressed and out in ten minutes flat. He's in the kitchen: his cooking skills have improved marginally over the last decade or so, but breakfast is still the safest bet.

"You're going to eat, and you're going to listen. This is complicated."

"You said-"

"Eating. Discussion."

She eats without further argument. He makes coffee, and that perks her up a little more, though there are still dark circles under her eyes.

"The drug you took is called Dargol. There's an antidote. It won't change the way you look again, but you'll get your memories back. I don't know if I can get the formula, and I don't know what's involved in making it. Before I even try, you have to decide if you want me to."

He knows she must want this desperately, but she's smart. She doesn't say 'yes' immediately. She thinks. "You knew her - me - pretty well?"

"Pretty well," he says.

"And you think there's some reason I might not want - my - memories back?"

"Aside from whatever reason you took Dargol in the first place? You've had some pretty bad things happen to you in your life. You might not want to remember them."

"Do you think they're why?"

"Nothing I can tell you about is going to be the reason you drugged yourself. I haven't seen you in several years. Don't ask me to explain. I'm not going to."

"But you think I need to know anyway?"

He smiles without humor. "It's called 'informed consent.'"

She nods. "Okay."

"Some of what Mitchell told you was true and accurate. You're an only child and an orphan. When you were eight years old, your parents were crushed to death by a coverstone in a museum exhibit a few feet from where you were standing. You watched them die."

"Oh, my Lord!" Alex says. "That's awful! I'm so sorry."

Her voice is sympathetic, but Nielsen can see she doesn't quite _get it._ "Alex, it didn't happen to me. It happened to _you._ If you get your memory back, you're going to remember it. The way you remember playing chess with Mike three weeks ago. Or picking out your car. You'll remember that you had a mother and father, and that you loved them, and how they screamed when they died."

She takes a deep breath. Still not quite getting it. No comparable experiences. But she's trying. "There has to be more," she says.

"Your only living relative was your mother's father Nicholas. He came and took you out of the country at the funeral. He wasn't supposed to have custody, so when he came back to the States four years later, you became a ward of the State of New York. I don't know what happened to you over the next four years. Whatever it was, it was so bad you wouldn't ever tell anyone."

She nods, but she's starting to look a little shaken.

"You petitioned for Emancipated Minor status and went off to college at sixteen. You were very smart. You were also very radical. Nine years later you had four doctorates, and you'd destroyed any possible hope of ever having a career. You'd just been fired from a low-paying menial job at Berkeley when the government hired you."

"Why would they want me?" she asks.

"Some of your theories weren't as wrong as everyone thought. But you couldn't prove them. The government wanted you as a translator. Your job involved a lot of travel. On your first mission, you brought a pet dog with you. It was just about the only thing you had in the world to love. You pissed off one of the other people with you, and he shot it dead in front of you."

She recoils as if it's happening right now. "Didn't anything _good_ ever happen?" she asks a little desperately.

"For a while. You stayed in that first post for a year, living with the natives. You formed strong friendships, particularly with a woman named Sha're. You loved her deeply. At the end of that year, the place was overrun, and to save Sha're from being tortured to death - something you knew you couldn't prevent - you picked up an M16 and shot her to death."

"Stop," Alex says.

"Alex, this isn't even the beginning. You've killed people. You've been tortured dozens of times. You've had to make decisions nobody on Earth should have to make. You've had to watch the people you loved being tortured - leave them to die - and not do anything to save them."

She's staring at him in a mixture of horror and disbelief. "I wouldn't do that!"

"It was your job."

"You said I was a translator!" she says accusingly. He knows she hopes he's lying to her.

"That's what the government hired you to do. It turned out they needed you to be a soldier, too."

"John ... I'm five foot four and I wear glasses. I'm allergic to just about everything. Who the _hell_ would ask me to be a soldier?"

"Crazy, desperate people, Alex. Crazy, desperate people."

"I have to..." she says, getting up. She walks out onto the deck; he pours her another cup of coffee, and follows her. She takes it without saying anything. "How long was I a soldier?" she asks after a while.

"Until you took the drug that made you forget."

He watches while she runs the numbers in her head. "That's twenty-one years. There isn't any war that's gone on that long - not anywhere!"

"I'm pretty sure there is. Like I say, I've been out of the game for a while. It's been a secret for a long time, though."

There's another long pause; he watches her struggle not to argue with him and win that fight. "Do you think I had a good reason to forget who I was?" she asks next.

"I don't know. I think you thought it was." Dani's logic wasn't ever necessarily the same as Earth logic.

"So I've pretty much got to hide out for the rest of my life."

Nielsen sighs. "Pretty much."

"From my own government," she says, sounding miffed now, and he laughs.

"Oh, no, sweetheart. From every government on Earth. Dani was _very_ popular."

#

She decides she doesn't want to hear any more just now - if he doesn't mind, thank you, John. It's fine with him. Dredging up O'Neill's memories of Dani's life and filing off the serial numbers on them enough so that Alex can swallow them without choking is a strain that ranks up there with self-dentistry. And there are one or two they're just going to skip, screw everyone. He already knows he can't tell her enough to tell her what she'll be remembering. He's missed the last thirteen years of her life, and okay, the first eight were bad enough, but the grand finale has to have been ... killer.

They leave it at that for a while, and if she doesn't quite perk up and come out of her shell, at least she comes out of her room. Starts poking at the newspaper - want ads and apartments. Hasn't given up on getting her memory back or finding out more about her past, but she's at least thinking about being cautious. But this is the week Bregman's documentary escapes into the wild. It was filmed after he and O'Neill parted ways, but he was still spying on the SGC back then, and the Air Force Documentary Unit leaked like a sieve. He captures a copy from one of the mirror sites before it's pulled. Nielsen watches it with morbid masochism - a lot of flag-waving and talking heads, but there's one _fuck_ of a money shot - then brings the machine he pulled it down on home.

Mike's here, but he's working up a case. Dinner's Thai from one of their favorite take-out places. Afterward, Nielsen tells him he's taking Alex into his office to have wild sex with her for a couple of hours. Right now he could tell Mike that aliens were landing on the roof. Actually, Mike would notice that a bit more, since they might interrupt his communing with _Kramer vs. Kramer._ "Couple hours," he says vaguely. Nielsen grabs him for a kiss before Mike wanders back into the wilds of patent law again.

"We aren't going to have wild sex," Alex says doubtfully, wrinkling her nose at him. He's not sure what she disapproves of _now._ Maybe it's the implication that he'd cheat on his boyfriend.

"No. Thirteen years ago, the Air Force made a documentary about where you worked and what you did for a living, in case they ever decided to let people know what they had under Cheyenne Mountain. It was classified. But your top secret program is going public now - or it will be pretty soon - and the documentary's escaped. You can see it."

"I'm on it?"

"Yes."

"Are you?"

"I would have been fifteen."

"Is-"

"He wasn't there yet. And do you want to see it, or do you want to keep asking me questions?"

She looks at nothing for long enough that he knows she's actually thinking it over. Solid information, with pictures. The truth. Then she looks back at him. "I want to see it," she says. Scared, nervous, determined, and he knows he's about to take away just about all the innocence Alex has left.

"Come on."

They go into his office. He kicks up the second laptop, and tucks the earbuds into her ears. He's heard this once and he isn't really interested in a repeat performance. He finds something else to do - it runs an hour and a half; if they ran it commercial it would probably top up to two hours, maybe three if they tossed in a little more commentary - while she sits and watches. From time to time he glances up. She's staring at the screen. Watching her. Watching them (and Alex has no idea how she felt about the people she's seeing. Carter and Frasier and Teal'c and Hammond and O'Neill and Walter Davis and the Simmons boy. Dixon and Balinsky. Harper and Reynolds.) She only knows that she's finding out that she - the person she thinks of as _The Other Her_ \- has spent the last twenty years traveling around the universe through an alien transportation device called the Stargate. That she - Dr. Danielle Jackson - got to work.

And he's told her she was fighting a war. Bregman says that too, all wrapped up in jingoism and smarm and brave boys and noble necessary sacrifice, and Nielsen thinks - hopes - that the sight of herself covered in Frasier's blood and screaming for a medic will do more than anything he ever could to _explain,_ but she gets to the end - crying - and takes the earbuds out of her ears and turns to him and says: "I want my memories back."

"Alex," he says. And he has absolutely no idea what comes next.

"Don't you argue with me, John Nielsen! You saw that! I was doing something important! Something that needed to be done! I have to get my mind back and go do it again!"

"Do we think we might have thought about that before we took the nice alien brain-scrubbing drug and committed _treason,_ Alex?"

"'Treason?'" she says, blinking.

"Theft of alien technology. Misappropriation of alien technology. Violation of a stack of non-disclosure agreements about an inch thick. Violation of your government employment contract. And that's only what I _know_ about of the things you've been up to recently. We'll also mention that there's no way in hell you can prove that you're Dani Jackson."

"Dental records, and, and fingerprints, and ... DNA," she says, but she's looking worried.

He laughs. "After all the times you've been in a sarcophagus, your dental records aren't worth much, and I have no fucking clue what a Dargol regeneration's done to your teeth. I know you don't have one single scar that I remember. DNA? Fingerprints? The nice man in Washington made sure that whatever you've got won't match whatever they've got on file."

"All right," she says stubbornly. "I can't prove I'm her. But I can still do what she was doing. I'll just join up again."

He runs his hand through his hair then pinches the bridge of his nose. "It's not that easy, Alex."

"And I will have a better idea of what I can and can't do once I remember everything," she says, and oh god, she might not _be_ Dani in any way that counts, but she is just as fucking stubborn. "What if you were supposed to give me the antidote?"

He opens his mouth. "If you swear again I'm going to leave the room," she says primly.

He groans. "'Supposed' to give you the antidote?"

"What if I was escaping from something? What if I didn't want to tell Cameron because - I don't know - because it was a secret?"

"And you left a note written in invisible ink pinned to your underwear explaining your _whole terrific plan_ and it accidentally got lost?"

"What if there _was_ a note and it got lost? I wouldn't know, would I?" She says reasonably. She looks unhappy for a moment, having thought of something. "Or maybe Cameron didn't like the plan. Men can be awfully stupid about the women they love sometimes, you know."

"So he tore up your secret instructions?"

"Maybe. Or maybe he couldn't get the antidote. You said it'd be hard for you to get it. And you said I had to, _she_ had to, steal the drug. And she worked there and she was important."

"You are an idiot," he says comprehensively.

"Apparently I didn't used to be," she says tartly. "I want-"

"Shut up." He goes over to the laptop, finds the file, deletes it, and sets the security software to scrubbing the harddrive. In a couple of hours, there won't be any trace it was ever there. He's thinking. Parts of her inane babblings are complete drivel. Parts of it almost make sense.

Dani might have had a plan and not let Mitchell in on it. He has no idea of her relationship to Mitchell: being willing to fuck the guy doesn't mean she'd be willing to talk to him, and god knows she'd tried to lie to O'Neill often enough. O'Neill'd been smart enough to catch her out, but not always fast enough to keep her from running a rogue operation when she thought it was the right thing to do (mutiny was only the beginning of her bag of tricks.) Or just getting in the hell over her head.

If she'd needed to _get the hell out of Dodge_ she might have trusted Mitchell that far, but not with the other half of the information. Either not then, or ever. If it was something Mitchell was supposed to get later, either her timing sucks - because it's coming up on three months now, and Mitchell would go to O'Neill, and O'Neill would ping him - or the message was lost. If she wouldn't trust Mitchell with it _ever,_ either she was expecting to get the information to herself some other way (she always trusted too damned much to luck; it always drove O'Neill crazy) and her conduit's gone astray, or there's no message at all.

Or her conduit was O'Neill, and he's deliberately destroyed the message she was supposed to get. Destroyed the message, picked her up from Mitchell's place, dropped her here. Say hello to the rest of your life as an amnesiac idiot, Danielle Jackson.

And John Nielsen knows Jack O'Neill better than anyone else on Earth. And he knows how much O'Neill loved her. He knows O'Neill told him she's been screwing Mitchell for twelve years, and he knows that ten years ago O'Neill went off and married somebody else. He knows that love can turn to hate. And he knows that neither of them - him or O'Neill - ever forgives. If she needed to escape, maybe she'd use Mitchell and the Dargol to get her out and expect O'Neill to be waiting for her on the other side with the antidote, so she could do ... whatever the fuck she thought was so goddamned important.

And maybe O'Neill decided it wasn't that important after all.

Nielsen has no way of knowing. Whatever the whole story is, he knows the bastard hadn't told him one single lie (the truth is always the best disguise.) Nielsen's sure that the NID _is_ searching for her, and that O'Neill has covered Alex's backtrail to erase all connection between Alex and Dani. He can't look up Mitchell for proof, because if his paranoid conspiracy theory is true, Mitchell doesn't know a damned thing. He doesn't even know if he's right. The only one who knows is Dani, and Dani has ... left the building.

He's been thinking for a long time. When he stops, he looks over. Alex is sitting with her hands in her lap. Waiting patiently. He reaches out and touches her cheek. She blinks in surprise. He doesn't touch her that often. Not if he can avoid it, really. "Do you want to remember?" he asks.

"Yes," she says simply.

"I'll try to get what we need."

#

As being locked up in a military nuthouse goes, it isn't too bad. The most annoying part of it (there are a lot of annoyances, and Cam scrupulously ranks them) is reminding himself that he isn't supposed to escape. He's in prison. You're supposed to escape from prison. Not this time. Annoying.

He isn't violent (oh, but he'd like to be), so he's allowed out on the General Ward during the day. He does what he can there for the fellas who actually _do_ belong here (too many of them over from the SGC), listening, telling them there's no shame in having to lay down the load. He sees MacKenzie three times a week, but since he's been lying like a rug to MacKenzie for the past twelve years, he really doesn't see a lot of reason to stop now. MacKenzie keeps asking him questions that are either damfool or none of his business, anyway, like if he's been under unusual stress lately. Of course he hasn't. He just got back from a month's leave. And they put the Ori to bed ten years ago; nothing since is really going to compare. (The other thing MacKenzie wants to know about is Cam's relationship to Jackson, and Cam keeps telling him that the question is too damned vague, and MacKenzie shoots back that he just wants to know anything Cam cares to tell him, and Cam answers that he doesn't care to tell him anything, and next session they go through the same damned thing all over again.)

MacKenzie never asks him _why_ he shot up the Control Room, which is just as well, as Cam has no particular intention of laying out the whole real truth about that one. Aside from telling MacKenzie to go read Jackson's memos.

At least he's allowed to have visitors - though he isn't let to have access to phone or email, or to send letters - so he gets Nyan and Major Simmons to close up his place for him, put his things in storage, put the condo on the market. Apparently he's crazy, but still sane enough to execute legal documents. Graham arranges to get his 'Stang garaged out of the weather, and to turn over the engine a couple of times a week so the battery doesn't go dead.

He isn't worried about anyone finding one damned thing they shouldn't when they close up his place, because the last morning he signed into the Mountain, he took Sam's gadget in with him and slipped it into one of the labs on Level 19. The tech boys don't know half of what they've got around the place, and another multi-frequency jammer will fit right in. And if they ever review the security tapes to place him in the lab with it, they can't tie him to having it outside the Mountain. Any child of Momma's learns the art of plausible deniability early.

MacKenzie's got him on a regimen of pills: tranquilizers, sleeping pills, anti-depressants. Cam's expert both at not taking them and at faking their effects.

The constant low-level noise is annoying. The single bed is annoying. Showering only every other day is annoying. Not being allowed to shave himself is annoying. Not having his music is annoying. The communal television set behind a wire mesh (with the channels chosen by the orderlies, and never any news) is annoying. Wearing pajamas 24/7 is annoying. The food (with plastic utensils only) is _really_ annoying. _Mustn't escape,_ he reminds himself.

Graham says his family's been told he's on detached duty, and won't be in touch for a while. That's a comfort. But he wants out of the Air Force, and he wants to go home, and the idea that they're just going to maybe keep him locked up here for something like _the rest of his life_ doesn't sit any too well at all. And he's been here two months (thinking that it might almost be worth it to bust out - if just long enough to get a message to someone in the Family - and he's gotten far enough down that road to be deciding what it should say, and who he should call (or email), and figuring out the best way to get out-and-back in without anybody noticing, when he has an unexpected visitor.

Sam.

She's all spiffed up (Dress Blues) and it's the Full Moon, so the General Ward is goddamned noisy (enough to give Cam a headache and make him think about taking some of those pills for real) and maybe even asking permission to go back to his room (and having to ask the orderlies for permission to do anything sticks in his craw; some of them are nice enough, but others like to gloat a bit too much for Cam's taste, and he knows that any attitude adjustment lessons he administered would put paid to any chance he'd ever have of walking out of this place a free man.) Sam takes one look around (flanked by a couple of bruisers that dwarf her, and she isn't a little girl, and Cam knows she could lay them both out without trying if she was of a mind) and asks if there's somewhere quieter that she and Colonel Mitchell can talk.

So the two of them get to go off to the Visitor's Lounge, and Sam orders his escort to make themselves scarce, and there's whipcrack steel in her voice, and they don't give her any sass. And he knows she's seen him scared and hurt and filthy, but he still wishes he'd gotten to shave and shower today. He sits down on the couch, and she sits down beside him. Takes his hand.

"I came as soon as I could," she says quietly.

"'Preciate it," he answers.

"I understand that our Dialing Computers had a sudden spontaneous malfunction," she says, squeezing his hand. "Wildfire in the circuits. Total loss. They'll have to be rebuilt from scratch."

"Do tell," Cam says.

"Why?" Sam says, and her voice is urgent now. "Cam ... why?"

"To buy you time, Sam," he answers. "Can't stop what's coming. I know that. Nobody can. But give everybody a little while to think about things, instead of rushing right through the Gate..."

Sam laughs; it's harsh bark of pain. "It will be two years - or more - before there's a new interface in place. Until then, we've got six of the 306's on the line here, and three more assigned full-time to Pegasus. Russia has four."

"The IOC has...?" Cam prompts.

"Zero," Sam says, smiling a wolfish grin. "The US and Russia control access to the high ground and offworld resources. The IOC may have gotten control of the Stargate turned over to it - which they have, Cam, and oh, god, I fought that, we all did - but they don't have any way to turn it on."

"And I guess the IOC is going to have to come up with the funding to build a new interface," Cam says.

"That's right," Sam says. "Proportional allocation from all member nations. They're currently arguing about where to put the Stargate. Switzerland's lobbying heavily, on the basis of its long history of neutrality."

"And chocolate," Cam says. He shakes his head. "What about importing a DHD?"

"Russia's refusing, and we won't do it. Our treaty obligates us to share information and technology but not resources, and the only shipyards capable of building the 306s are in the US. For anyone else to gear up to build one, even with the blueprints, will take years. Oh, we'll ferry carefully-chosen scientific teams offworld by ship to our bases to go through their Stargates. But we'll have a lock on Gate travel for the next several years." They look at each other for a moment. "That's what you wanted, isn't it?" she adds softly.

Cam sighs, and doesn't answer.

"Nyan ... packed up Dani's apartment," Sam says after a moment. "What was left. Is there anything you'd...?"

Cam shakes his head. The only keepsake he wants is tucked safely away at home, where he doesn't think even Momma will find it: a narrow collar of black leather with a plain brass buckle, its leather made soft and supple by years of wear.

"They haven't had any luck finding who killed Agent Hardin," Sam says idly, gazing out the window. "The police were thinking suicide until the coroner's report came in. Looks like his larynx was crushed."

"Couldn't happen to a nicer guy," Cam says.

"Heard you resigned," Sam says, turning back.

"Doing my best," Cam says. He smiles at her, because she's still his Sam, his teammate. "They're making it kind of difficult."

"No, they aren't," Sam says. "Not if they want to keep their fucking trained monkey. And they do."

_"Samantha!"_ Cam says, shocked.

"Oh come on, Cam, after ten years on the same Gate Team as Dani, didn't you think I knew the words? They want me to serve as Air Force liaison to the IOC. I told them if they don't want me on _Nightline, Inside: Access,_ and CNN instead, you get a clean medical discharge and out of here within 48 hours. You'll still have your exit interviews, but that shouldn't take more than a week or so."

"Medical?" Cam says, dubiously.

"Best I could do," Sam says. "Not psychiatric; straight-up 'injured in the line of duty.' And no charges for destroying approximately thirty billion dollars of government property, either."

She's been holding his hand the whole time, and he's grateful for the touch. But oh, he feels the darkness swirling around beneath his skin, the Cameron Sam has never met and never should, and he pulls his hand away gently. "It's a good deal, Sam. Thanks. All I want to do is go home."

"You should do that," Sam says seriously. "Call me when you get there. I'll let Momma know to expect you."

"Thanks," Cam says. "It's been the usual story."

Sam smiles at that, but the smile doesn't reach her eyes. They talk a couple minutes more but it's awkward; she doesn't want to talk about what she's been doing, and Cam doesn't know any current events. She kisses him on the cheek when she leaves, and promises to keep in touch, but Cam knows it will only be cards at Christmas now. Sam's still strong. She hasn't fallen down for the last time. Not yet. Cam doesn't know whether he has, or whether he's given up. He wasn't sure which it was for Jackson, either, not really.

He knows they never would have let Jackson go. Too valuable.

That evening they transfer him from Secured Medical to General Medical, and he gets to shower without supervision, and shave (by himself, with a razor) and eat his dinner with metal utensils, and refuse medication. And in the morning, an orderly comes to bring him a set of Class A's, and Graham shows up with the paperwork to get him _the fuck out of this place_ (promising to bring him the 'Stang once he's in Peterson BOQ), and he spends the next week or so getting debriefed and signing papers promising he'll never tell anybody anything about anything ever. (Damned silly, considering that the Program's going public and is currently leaking like a sieve, but that's the military for you.) His condo sold while he was in the hospital (the SGC's Legal Department has his limited POA for this sort of thing; they handled the closing) and now that he's out, he tidies up his finances, wires the money to his accounts at home, calls Momma and tells her that everything's all right, that he's separated, that he's fine, that he's coming home.

Settling his affairs in the Springs takes a little longer than his separation interviews do. Because he's spent the last two months in the psych wing, he gets to skip the separation counseling, which is nice. And two weeks after he walks out of the Academy hospital for the last time, two and a half months after he got back to the Springs _(three months and one week after Jackson stopped existing)_ he gets into his Mustang and leaves Colorado Springs for the last time.

#

It takes Nielsen a month to get the formula for the cure out of the databases at Area 51. Three weeks of that time is spent finding somebody who can crack their security, since he can't just call up Carter (who wouldn't need to crack their security, in the first place.) For a million-five in bearer bonds (one third when she takes the job, one third when she decides she can do it, one third when she has what he wants) a pink-haired twenty-year-old named DeeDee with tattoos and multiple piercings gets her cyber-ass in through the military guard-dogs. She probably steals them blind while she's there. He doesn't give a damn. She comes out with what he wants, and he doesn't ask questions.

Alex is patient and cheerful, and (oh, god) _happy._ She's planning to go home to the reverent and stainless Colonel Mitchell just as soon as she's Dani Jackson again, and Nielsen cannot even _begin to imagine_ the feats of mental gymnastics and denial going on in her brain allowing her to believe that's going to be possible. He doesn't know what Dani told Mitchell. Considering Mitchell's job, he may not even still be alive. These things happen. She's been ... gone ... two and a half months.

The Stargate's on its way to being an open secret. Nobody's quite admitting to its existence, but they're cautiously allowing as to how the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations is pretty much a sure thing, and that 'for some time several of the nations of Earth' have been in contact with these civilizations. Yeah, and beating the hell out of them, too. All the information is shrouded in conditionals, but everybody's saying oh yeah, sure, these extraterrestrial civilizations are all, absolutely, one hundred percent, peaceful and friendly. Guess nobody's gonna be airing Bregman's documentary on prime-time any time soon.

People are having the usual fits over 'space aliens' and demanding television interviews. Anybody with a leg up in aerospace has a license to coin money, and Giza would be making its stockholders very happy if it had any. As it is, Nielsen's getting richer. He's shopping for a biochemist with no morals and no curiosity. Since he also wants one that he can trust not to _kill_ Alex by being an _incompetent asshole,_ -and because John Nielsen really has to be just a bit careful about what he's connected with (he sure as hell can't advertise on Monster.com and then sift resumes) - it takes a while.

It would be entertaining to call up the Old Man and ask him for help. Not entertaining enough to have to track Alex down from wherever the Old Man hides her next. If he bothers. If Nielsen's right (in his grand little paranoid conspiracy theory for one), the ultimate solution to O'Neill's worries and cares is as close as another dose of Dargol and slipping Dani/Alex/Jane Doe/The Lost Anastasia into a convenient insane asylum. She won't be crazy when she goes in, but she will be soon enough.

If he's wrong, well, Dani can tell him soon enough.

It takes him October and November and part of December until he's got a chemist set up in a lab, and goddammit, it only took Frasier a couple of days, and the first batch this guy says is the antidote he isn't willing to inject himself with, although Nielsen says (smiling, holding a gun on him) that if he's got the formula right it won't do a thing to him.

On Batch Number Two the guy tries a bait-and-switch to a second bottle for the proof-of-concept test injection, and Nielsen fills a syringe from the bottle he wants to use, and squirts some onto the back of his hand, and it's saline. Nielsen tells him he _will_ be injected with the next batch. And it will be ready soon.

"Don't think of running," he says. "Trust me. You wouldn't like what would happen to you. Or your two girlfriends in Lodi and San Jose. Or your mother in Simi Valley."

"Jesus," the guy says. "Jesus, Harry. I'm close. I swear. Just a few more days."

"I'm glad," Nielsen says. His chemist knows him as Harry Maybourne. He's sure Harry wouldn't mind.

#

Mike has a large happy family back East (somewhere between Kansas City and Montauk Point), and Blind Justice pretty much packs her bags in December anyway. For Christmas this year, Nielsen gives him one of those "Endless Summer" packages: ten luxury days in Australia, timed to deposit him on the doorstep of the Family Tedesco about the time the curtain goes up on a NASCAR Christmas.

"Pack your bags, honey, you're going on a Surfin' Safari," he says at dinner, dropping the folder on the table. "Merry Christmas."

Mike picks up the travel agency folder and looks through it (a combination of puzzled and pleased; December on the Coast sucks and so do the waves.) "Is this your way of telling me you want me out of the house for a while?"

"Yeah, but I also wanted to do something nice for you. If you can't go now, just let them know; they'll reschedule you."

"Oh, damn, no, Johnny. This is rad. I mean ... you ought to come along. Not this time, I know, but. Some time?"

"Sure. Sun-stroke, shark attack, surfboard concussion, and the many poisonous reptiles of Australia. The inducements never stop. And don't call me Johnny."

Mike smirks at him. "You're forgetting thong swimsuits and twelve percent beer."

"True."

"I need to leave tonight?"

"It's going to take me a few days to get the orgy lined up with the outcall service. Stay until your flight."

#

"You aren't having an orgy," Alex says, as if she isn't quite sure. Three days later, as Mike's limousine - with Mike, and Mike's luggage, and Mike's favorite surfboard - pulls away from the house. It's December 7th. Pearl Harbor Day. Suitable, all things considered.

She's been pissed-off with him for the past three days for throwing Mike out of the house in this cavalier fashion. Alex (god help them all) has _standards,_ and he's constantly falling short. Paging Emily Post.

"No. I wanted to get him the hell out of the house and make sure he wouldn't come back."

She wrinkles her nose. More disapproval. Where the hell does she come up with it - it can't be genetic. She's been a Real Live Girl for four and a half months, and three and a half of them have been spent in _this_ den of iniquity, and you'd think she'd been raised in a convent run by Miss Manners. She thinks he ought to have a _Christmas Tree,_ for god's sake. Send out cards. Deck the halls. Where the hell did she _get_ these ideas?

"Why?"

"Sit."

He goes into his office. He's got a refrigerator there, and his prize package has been sitting in it since he picked it up. The lab notes from Area 51 said the antidote is volatile, with a short shelf-life. This will be good for about ten more days, even with refrigeration and darkness, then it will start to decay. He picks it up, picks up the disposable injector in its plastic all-in-one kit. Walks back out.

"Merry Christmas, Alex. This is why I kicked Mike out. This is the antidote."

She stares up at him, eyes wide. Puts a hand on her chest in a gesture that ought to be theatrical but it's just something Alex _does._ The way she says 'oh my Lord' and 'Sakes Alive' and talks as if she's never been north of the Smith  & Wesson line.

"That's ... it?" she says breathlessly.

"That's it," he says. He looks at her. "Last chance."

She swallows hard, staring at him, eyes wide, and he knows she isn't going to back out. "I. I. In case it. In case it does something else, I got you a present. I got Mike a present, too. They're in my dresser drawer, a'ight? An' I wrote ever'thin' down, it's in a book, it's in my underwear drawer, an', an'-"

"Sh'h'h," he says. "Hold out your arm, Alex."

She holds out her arm, blinking hard.

He opens the injector, tears open the foil packet of alcohol wipe, swabs down the inside of her elbow. Breaks the seal on the bottle with the needle, draws the dose up into the tube, squeezes the air out. Vein, muscle, or mucous membrane, it doesn't matter, but into the vein will work fastest. He pushes the vein up with his thumb, slips the needle in, slides the antidote home.

She closes her eyes, drops her chin to her chest, turns her head sideways - away from him - frowning a little. She draws her arm out of his grasp and folds her hands in her lap, eyes still closed. Her mouth settles into a hard line. She gets to her feet - head still turned away from him; he can't see whether her eyes are open or not - and walks to the fireplace. She's facing away from him.

"'Bad intel fucks over more operations than enemy action.' What a pity you didn't remember that before you decided to fucking meddle, Johnny-boy." Her voice is lower, rougher, deeper. The Southern accent is gone.

"Dani?" he says warily.

She turns around, and he didn't think there was any expression on any human face that could make him recoil. But she doesn't look human. Her eyes are flat and cold and furious, and there's nothing human there. She smiles, and that only makes it worse. "Don't you want to give your Dani a kiss 'hello', Johnny? Ah, but you don't kiss girls, do you?"

He gets to his feet. Old instincts tell him it isn't safe to be sitting while she's standing. She takes a step, _two,_ toward him, undulating, hips swaying, holding her hands out to him, smiling, and it's nineteen years ago, and it's _Hathor,_ and he backs up so fast he falls down.

And she stops, and lowers her arms, and laughs, and it's bright and cold and vicious and Dani never laughed like that, even when she'd been driven mad. "No," she says, breaking off abruptly. "You don't."

"What happened to you?" he asks. Quietly. He gets carefully to his feet. All of his instincts are screaming at him not to startle her. He wonders if he's going to get out of this room alive.

"Why couldn't you have left me in peace?" she asks, even more quietly, and now her voice is desperately weary. "Did you _believe_ that whining little bitch? Oh, god, trust me. If Mitchell took her to bed even once, she'd run _screaming._ " She pauses to consider. "Unless, of course, she had an unsuspected taste for fist-fucking. You never know." She smiles at him - that brilliant, mad, _evil_ smile - and says: "You thought I wanted this undone."

He wishes to hell - now - that he'd gotten the formula for the Dargol, gotten it made up, had it here. "Yes."

"You didn't think I'd want to _forget?_ "

"You never did."

"You never knew me well enough. You didn't know me after we fucked. After you spent three months on ice. After you came back. After we spent another year fucking like bunnies. Oh, we managed. He could barely stand to touch me and he couldn't look at me naked, but I found taking it up the ass to be a rewarding lifestyle. I would have done anything for Jack. But you know that. I could fuck _you_ now, Johnny. Trust me. You'd like it. Shall I? You'll come harder than you ever have in your life. Call it a hostess gift."

He takes an involuntary step backward.

"But you wanted to know what happened to me. He went to Washington. I was going to go too. Eight years of war was enough. The _Goa'uld_ were gone. Only a new war came along, and I had to stay. And Mitchell came along, and a girl has to have her diversions, and he kept me alive - most of the time - and it took two years, but we won that one too. He was good to me. But I was still going to leave him. Only Jack came back, and fucked my boyfriend, and fucked me, and told me it was all over between us forever. And he left. And Mitchell stayed. He does everything to me I want him to. He puts a collar on me and makes me crawl. He stuffs his fist in my cunt and makes me scream. _He makes the voices in my head go away and he isn't here to do that any more, is he?_ " She smoothes her hands down her skirt - Alex's skirt, Dani wouldn't ever wear anything like that. She looks down, and when she looks up, it isn't Dani, it's Alex. "And I'm ever so sorry, John, I di'n't know what I wanted when I tol' you I wanted to know who I was an' all, but I was a stupid sorry li'l bitch," she says, in Alex's high sweet drawl. Then she lets Alex fall away again and he's gazing into the mouth of Hell.

"We'll get you help," he says hoarsely. It's the only thing he can think of to say. And he'd rather be back in Ba'al's torture chamber than see the expression on her face, the combination of dead mad eyes and mocking smile.

"I _had_ help. I'd helped myself. Could have done something else to solve the other problem, but I wanted... Oh, god. You don't know how much. And you took it away. And I can never have it back. Jack should have let you die. You weren't ever meant to exist."

O'Neill should have told him. That's all he can think of; it's going through his mind in the mantra-way that things do when disaster has hit to big and too fast for you to catch up. O'Neill should have told him. And: _Thank god Mike won't be back until after New Year's; it will be over by then..._ He's not sure what will be over. Or what O'Neill should have told. _'Whatever you do, don't give her the antidote'_? He'd just have done it faster. God help them every one.

"You didn't bring me back from the dead for the sake of the precious tears of little Alex. Better tell me what you were thinking, Johnny. My next stop might be Washington. I'm pretty sure the O'Neills' carefully-celibate marriage won't survive the General being caught fucking a nymphet on his office desk. And you know what Jack's like when he's really pissed-off."

"I'll stop you," he says. God knows how.

"You won't like the results. You know, if you'd just let the nymphet slit her precious throat, you could have saved yourself a lot of trouble and expense. Of course, I'd probably have scared the living fuck out of Mitchell."

"Dani-" he says.

_"Answer my goddamned question, you fucking little sodomite!"_

He'd thought he was already beyond shock. He isn't. "I thought you'd had a plan that involved getting the antidote to the Dargol from O'Neill. I thought he'd withheld it deliberately." He sits down heavily on the couch. He doesn't think it will make a hell of a lot of difference to his chances for survival.

"Because he married that bitch Kerry," she says, after a long pause.

"Yes," Nielsen says.

"They wouldn't let me go," she says, talking to herself now. "I never knew why he left." She walks over and sits down in the chair beside the fire, and when she speaks again, her voice is calm, rational. "You can go and get your gun if you'd like."

He's not sure by now if it will do any good, but he goes and gets both his gun and his Taser. She's still sitting when he comes back, staring into the distance at nothing, and her face is empty.

"I can get the formula for Dargol," he says.

"The host remembers," she answers. She turns and looks at him; her face is so dead and empty it's actually a shock when she speaks. "The Program was going public; they wanted a spokesperson to do the first round of disclosures at the UN and to be the liaison with the IOC. That's the International Oversight Committee - they succeeded the Stargate Treaty Signatory Organization; they've held our purse strings for about twelve years. More than half our funding for the last eight. I was the obvious choice. A harmless female civilian with an impeccably glamorous pedigree. I wouldn't have survived a month. And I could have handled a month of hell. I just couldn't... You remember Orlin?"

The question is so far out of left field that it takes him more than five minutes to come up with an answer. She waits the entire time in an inhuman silence. "Yeah," he says at last.

"Good. Short version. During the last war I died, I Ascended, I remember how, I'd probably do it again if some sniper decided to spatter my brains all over UN Plaza. If I turned into a glowing ball of light on national television I'm pretty sure somebody would declare war on somebody else within the hour. If not then, certainly when I showed up alive again a few days later."

"Jesus, Dani," Nielsen says.

"Exactly."

_'When I find out why amnesia is better than suicide, I'll let you know.' This is why, Old Man. This is why._

"Alex remembered all that. Not ... details. But the mechanics of how to do it. I didn't know that would happen. Wipe my mind - again - the _tabula rasa_ slits her throat in girlish despair, I come back. No point, really."

"Does...?"

"...Jack know I remember what I told everybody including him I don't? You're the expert on Jack O'Neill: you tell me. He doesn't know how Ascension works, though, so even if he knows I've got a head full of Ascended knowledge, I don't know if he'd put it together. When he does, you'd better have a good explanation for where Alex is." She gets to her feet.

"Where are you going?" He asks despite himself.

"Not Washington. Merry Christmas."

She walks into Alex's bedroom. About forty minutes later she walks out again. Jeans, turtleneck, jacket, all in the darkest colors Alex owns. Shoulderbag. Sneakers. Laptop case slung over her shoulder. She holds up the keys to Alex's car, and he nods. Right now he thinks he'd give her anything he owns if she'd just _leave._

She walks out without saying goodbye.

Once he hears the car drive away, he manages to get up off the couch and go far enough to lock the doors and arm the house security system. He goes from there to the liquor cabinet. Pours three fingers of something that shouldn't be abused the way he's about to, and drinks it down like water. Collects himself enough once the burn hits to put the gun away. Pours another knock, and goes into Alex's room. Alex's clothes are laid out in piles on the bed, where Dani sorted them. Alex's memory book is there too. So are the brightly-wrapped gifts for him and for Mike, and he's never cried in all the years of John Nielsen's existence, but he'd really like to now, he thinks. How can you miss somebody who never existed at all?

It's not just Alex he misses. It's _Dani._ All he had left of Dani was murdered right here in his living room about an hour ago, so he supposes that's two nonexistent women he can hold a wake for here today.

It's a good thing there's plenty of Scotch.

#

She drives into Salinas and checks into a hotel. She spends another week in the area, liquidating Alex's investment portfolio, emptying her checking and savings accounts, pulling as much cash as she can off the charge cards. It's a good bit of money. It will take her where she needs to go.

Wherever that is.

She buys clothes that aren't frilly and lacy and bright and cheap (pieces for here, pieces so she won't freeze where she's going), and a coat heavy enough to keep her warm in Colorado. A duffel to hold the clothes. A backpack for her medications, for all her cash, for her ID. When she's done, she takes the last of Alex Tyler's lying skin to the nearest Dumpster and buries it deep.

She dreams of razor blades, of scoring her skin until it's too slippery to cut, of sluicing it down with alcohol and setting it alight. Anything to push the real pain away, when the voices roar in her ears, when the pain of _simply being_ blinds her, and she can't (she knows she can't) because Mitchell isn't here to catch her now. And she knows if she started cutting she wouldn't stop, and she doesn't know what would happen once she slipped free _(never knew, and it's the only thing she's afraid of, it's the reason she's never taken that escape in all these years, even at the end, when escape was so desperately necessary.)_

But because when her strength begins to fail her, she has to do _something,_ she goes to the hardware store and buys a hammer and a pair of pliers, and to the drugstore and buys a splint and some medical supplies, and then she goes back to her hotel room and breaks the little finger on her left hand with the hammer - carefully, precisely - and she prods at the broken finger for a while with the pliers and then takes them and works at her thumbnail until she can pull it off.

The pain is so bad it makes her gag - she has to stuff a pair of socks into her mouth while she does it to keep from making too much noise (the hotel room walls are thin) - but at least she can sleep that night and she thinks she'll be able to drive without an irresistible impulse to swerve into oncoming traffic. Where she'll drive _to_ is still in question, though. She's officially dead and has no interest in staging a glorious resurrection. Of course, she could get word to Sam, Jack, Mitchell...

She rules out Sam and Jack instantly. Sam was never in on any of this, and while she knows that Sam would keep her secret until the end of the world, three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead. So Jack always said. Jack? Over and done; they've been over and done for longer than they _were,_ and the fact that he came back for her _(came for Alex)_ is so profoundly distasteful to contemplate that she thinks it must hurt.

That leaves Mitchell.

She wants him so much she can't breathe. She has from the moment she remembered who she was. But he helped her escape, then took Alex to the safest place he knew (she remembers being Alex Tyler, the way she remembers being all the other people she's been down through the years, remembers Alex's behavior and motivations with the insane illogic of dreams. How much Alex loved Mitchell, and how he'd looked when he'd looked at her) and then Jack took Alex somewhere else. And Mitchell doesn't know the end of the story, and she has to make up her mind - right now - if it's better if he never does. She agonizes over that decision for two days before realizing that _she can't make it._ Mitchell has to, because these are the kinds of decisions and choices he took out of her hands ten years ago - firmly and decisively and with a promise of forever - and the only thing she can do is turn her mind to the problem of how to get him to make that decision without telling him she's ... back.

So she gets on the road, heading for Colorado Springs in Alex's little Mercedes while she thinks. And oh god, it's been more than three decades since she was a pretty little girl. Even in jeans and boots and turtleneck and black leather jacket she gets unwelcome attention and unwelcome comments. Most of it stops when they get a good look into her eyes. A few of them ask her price.

She makes Las Vegas at the end of her first day's drive: it's a little under 500 miles. Her left hand hurts (under the glove, under the bandages) but the pain lets her focus. Mustn't die. Mustn't get into a bad accident, either, because none of her ID numbers match the ones in the "Alex Tyler" ID packet Cam used, but she doesn't know if Nielsen will have gone running to Jack, and Nielsen knows all the numbers she's got, and if he's told Jack what he did _(what she said)_ , and little Alex ends up in the hospital, little Alex will probably end up in a hospital of a different kind. Depending on what kind of a man Jack O'Neill has turned into in the last ten years. What pieces are on the chessboard that she isn't aware of. And (of course) who else knows.

She's paid cash for gas and food all along the road, staying under the radar (difficult to do since everything's been heading toward 'cashless' for years, but you can buy 'prepaid gas cards' and she stocks up before she leaves Salinas), but when she gets to Las Vegas it's decision time. It's 2017: you have to show a passport or some form of National ID to check into a hotel, and once she's done that, she might as well use one of Alex's damned credit cards, because if somebody's got her number (ha, and it's been almost a quarter of a century since she thought jokes were funny) they'll be coming for her the moment the desk clerk runs Alex's passport against the "Watch and Warn" list. If they're coming for her at all. She picks her hotel carefully, a fleabag place at the edge of the city, and takes her gloves off, locks her duffle and her jacket in the trunk, picks up her backpack and her laptop, and goes inside, summoning up Alex Tyler carefully.

At the desk she first tries to pay cash (of course they won't let her) and then asks who will "know" she's here. Bandaged hand. Looking scared and tired and young. The bandages and the weariness are true enough. She tells the clerk she's going home - home for Christmas - that home is Black Mountain, North Carolina, and, well, she just doesn't want any _trouble..._

It's Mitchell's home and Mitchell's family, and today's December 16th. He might be flying out in a day or two.

The desk clerk doesn't give a flying fuck about Alex or her problems of course, and Alex would never have believed it. But since it's the middle of the night and a hysterical teenager (close enough) is pouring out her problems in the lobby of the NoTel MoTel, she has enough of a sympathetic audience to be able to plant her cover story: deranged abusive boyfriend in Law Enforcement from whom she is fleeing. She offers up her hand as proof. "He hurt me when I said I wanted to go home to Momma! All I want to do is go home!"

Oh, god, Dani almost sympathizes. She's really just a spectator to this: set the Alex-program to running, and she doesn't have to do much. It's had over three months to establish its operating parameters. And it's possible - now - that someone will warn the poor pretty little girl when (if) men in suits come looking for her. It's all Dani can do.

She goes to her room. Checks Alex's email (on a whim.) No new messages. Too dangerous to log into any of her own accounts. Some she can risk when she has access to a public terminal; the NID has probably recovered all the information from every computer she owns (owned), and she was never SG-1's hacker (that was Sam) so she doesn't know quite what information they can recover and what they can't. She doesn't have a fake ID to offer up at a public terminal, so she can't risk pinging her SGC account, and she doesn't know whether she wants to email Mitchell at the last-ditch rendezvous account the two of them set up. There's no reason for him to check it, anyway, if he thinks she's mindwiped.

She naps, wakes, naps. Nobody comes. She spends three days in Vegas (at three different hotels, up and down the Strip.) All undisturbed. On December 19th, she moves on.

It's a little over eight hundred miles to Colorado Springs. Nevada and a bit of Arizona then too much of Utah then almost five hundred miles of Colorado and she's been behind the wheel coming up on eighteen hours straight when she's back on familiar ground (spent the last two decades traveling from one side of the galaxy to the other and she's never had enough time or inclination to go much outside the city limits of the place where she's been living.) And she's still not sure what she plans to do, but it's the middle of the day (snow on the ground, snow everywhere, Christmas in four days and the streets filled with shiny happy people) so she drives to her old address.

So stupid to come here. She knows that even as she parks outside. But she's floundering. Part of her hopes some else will pounce on her; reel her in and lock her up and sedate her and it will be _all over_. She knows how to reprogram a _Goa'uld_ bomb (though not how to disarm one) but she doesn't know how to buy street drugs. She wishes she did. She aches for rest, and sleep hasn't been enough.

The downstairs door is chocked open. She pulls it open farther and goes inside. There's an unfamiliar name - two - on the mailboxes, and she climbs the stairs. The door to 4A is closed, but 4B - the playroom -is open. The hallway reeks of paint and chemicals. She peers inside. There are drop-cloths down all over the floor and the sound of hammering in the distance. The Formica- topped bar that separated the kitchenette from the loft has been ripped out, the ugly linoleum is gone (exposing the subfloor) and the cabinets and appliances have all been removed. _'I want a clean cup,' interrupted the Hatter: 'let's all move one place on.'_

She goes back down the stairs again. _Danielle Jackson doesn't live here any more._ It was what she'd wanted. But she hadn't wanted to be here to see it. She hopes they'd been careful enough - down through the years - with their network of cut-outs and false names and misdirections, or Mitchell was getting a royal fucking right now, and not in any enjoyable way.

It's December 20th. She finds a motel near the highway - no place she's ever stayed in her _life_ \- and checks in. Eats in the associated diner, sleeps long enough to take the road-noise out of her bones. It doesn't rest her. She'll never rest again, she thinks. Nobody comes to arrest her, so she goes on-line and searches the _Colorado Springs Gazette_ and the _Denver Post_ for the past three months. Her name doesn't appear in either paper anywhere, nor those of any of the people she knows, except for Sam's _('Dr. Samantha Carter, noted Air Force expert on deep space telemetry and consultant to the newly-formed UN Committee on Interstellar Affairs...')_ There are a number of stories about alien civilizations, which she ignores. They're all guesswork and lies.

She checks out of the motel - she'll check into a new one in the morning, on the other side of the city; hell, maybe even the Broadmoor - and drives around for a couple of hours, until she's convinced she isn't being followed. She bangs her broken finger absently against the steering wheel, thinking. Or to be honest, _trying_ to, because she knows she isn't, not very well; she's making mistakes, more and more of them, and it's going to add up to disaster, and she isn't even running away very well, and ... _oh, god, Mitchell, it didn't work and I don't know what to do now. Or how._

Accepting that makes her feel better than she has since she's gotten her mind back _(she'd rather not admit, even to herself, that she'll do anything in order to see him again, but it's probably a little too late in the game for self-deception.)_ At least she's one jump ahead this time. She's already disappeared. It's ten o'clock at night when she parks, six blocks away from his condo. She takes the backpack with her, because if she has to run, she can leave everything else behind. The money and ID is vital.

The garage door is up. He never leaves it open, even when he's not there. Strange car. Child's toys. She walks up to the garage warily. She knows she has the right unit. She goes around to the door. There's wreath on it. The window curtains are open. Tree. Strange furniture. She stands there, staring, until the front door is opened.

"Can I help you?" A young man - a few years older than Alex. Frowning at her suspiciously.

"I'm sorry," Alex says to him (it's dark, and he can't see her face, thank fuck.) "I'm looking for a friend of mine? Cam Mitchell? He lived here, but ... I just got back, and ... I haven't heard from him in a while."

A woman calls out from inside the house; a question. "Friend of that guy we bought the place from," he calls back. "Come in, come in," he says. "Freezing out here."

She takes a step back. "Oh, no, don't want to trouble you, I just ... my mail, you know..."

He looks sympathetic. He's probably Army or Air Force himself, and assumes she is too, just back from a long deployment. It's what she means him to think. "Yeah, they can get everything to you but your mail, can't they? Agency said he'd been transferred and wanted a quick sale; place came on the market about three months back and Lynne and I snapped it right up; we'd just been transferred up here from Benning. You in touch with his family?"

"I surely am. I'll go on back and give Aunt Sassy a call. She'll be glad I can get home in time for Christmas."

"Bet she will. You're lucky. You let me know if there's anything I can do. Dave Morris." He holds out his hand.

"I surely will. Alex Griffith." She steps forward - cautiously - to shake his hand, steps back quickly.

"Merry Christmas, Alex."

"Merry Christmas, David. You stay safe, hear?"

"You, too."

She walks off quickly. He steps back inside.

Three months. Mitchell sold his condo three months ago. Or died. She has to know. She's never seen Dave Morris before in her life, but he might work at the SGC. Ranger School is at Fort Benning; it's one of the places they troll for candidates for Offworld. If he is at the SGC, he'll report this - it's SOP to report any and every unsolicited encounter; they'd had to write up every door-to-door salesman, Watchtower evangelist, and Girl Scout Cookie drive that crossed their paths. Bad enough she'd asked for Mitchell. Thank god she gave a last name unconnected with anything they're searching for. The thought that Mitchell might be dead makes her hands shake.

Has to know.

She barely manages to talk herself out of logging into the SGC servers to check their records. She could probably still get in; she thinks her codes will still work; she thinks the NID is hoping she's going to be stupid enough to just log in. But the woman who knows those codes has been gone for three and a half months. She should _not_ be coming up out of the ground to run a personnel search. She checks into another motel.

December 21st. She takes out her cell-phone and calls the Mitchell residence. When she reaches Mitchell's father, she presents herself as Maria Garcia of the Veterans' Administration Department of Death Benefits, attempting to straighten out Colonel Cameron Everett Mitchell's paperwork; she's attempting to confirm a mailing address to which to send the final check...

"You want me to get Cam on the line to tell you how dead he is?" Mr. Mitchell says indignantly. "Bayliss! You get Cameron in here! Those damnyankees've screwed up his paperwork one more time - I told him they couldn't tell the difference between 'retired' and 'dead' - Now, young lady, I know you're just doing your job, but my boy's done his for more'n twenty years, and-"

She closes her phone - cutting him off - and grips it tightly. Not dead. Retired _(why?)_ and home with his family. But alive.

With the hammer and pliers, she takes the phone apart and crushes the pieces. She opens her computer and sets the password-protected security delete running. By the time the battery's drained, the hard drive will have been scrubbed. She checks out of the motel, and drives to the big mall at the edge of the city, the one near the interstate. She leaves the computer in the trunk, and the car unlocked, keys in the ignition. She picks up her duffle and her backpack and walks off. She has to see him again. That's all she can think of. Especially now.

It's 1500 miles to Mitchell's home town, and there's only one way she can think of to get there without showing ID.

#

He spent September and October and a touch of November in the loony-bin and he got home just about two weeks before Thanksgiving to tell Momma and Daddy that he'd chucked his career and come home for good. First thing he does when he's got a moment is go to the Dead File, and get back that letter about Alex, and tear it open, and burn up the pages. Tears up his Dead Letter, too, 'cause they won't be needing it now. Gets his stuff shipped home out of storage so he can get his hands on his clothes and his personal papers and his this'n'that and parcel the rest out amongst any of the Family who might feel a need.

Every year he'd ever been able to make it home for Thanksgiving, Cam's been in the thick of things every minute he could be, but this year he spends it up in the back attic, sitting on the old white iron bed where Daddy's brother Addison Treece spent three years sleeping and waking when he came back from his war. Uncle Baby Addy's war is just about fifty years gone by now (he had a cousin a few years older coming up about the same time he was named, and nicknames, well, they stick), and nobody much liked it, and it left scars you could see, and scars you couldn't, and Uncle Baby Addy's were the second kind. And he wrestled his angels up here three years, while Gran'ma brought him up his meals and nobody said a word. And then he came on down one morning to breakfast, and got on with his life, and nobody said a word about that either.

Cam isn't sure he's ever coming down.

It's not as bad as all that. When the uproar dies down around the house after Thanksgiving, he comes down, and Momma doesn't say a thing. When he comes down, he's wearing a narrow band of black leather looped twice around his left wrist and buckled, and Momma doesn't say a thing about that either.

He spends a lot of time just driving around the county. Some time sitting out on the porch. When the company gets to be too much, he goes on back up to the attic. He sleeps there sometimes, but he's not quite ready to give in and move there.

Landry said he was suffering from PTSD. If you got MacKenzie good and drunk, he probably would have said Cam was _batshit crazy._ In Cam's personal expert opinion, he happens to be a grieving widower in desperate need of getting his ashes hauled, and it is just too fucking damned bad he's a special needs case. (Too damned bad he can't tell a single living soul he was _married,_ either, but hell, he's kind of used to that after ten years.) He knows that even within the realm of what's called the "sex-positive" community (as if there's anybody who's actually _against_ sex) what he and Jackson had, and did, and were to each other wasn't all that common. He's not all that sure he can find someone else to do it with, even somebody he pays, and he doesn't want to pay for pretend. He's not all that sure he wants it without love, either. He just wants. And needs. And sooner or later he's going to have to figure out something to do about all that, or he might as well go off somewhere quiet and finish breaking his family's hearts. And he's damned if he'll do that. It's just too bad that Cam thinks he's pretty much damned. When the Family starts to gather for the holiday, he heads on up to the attic. _Uncle Cam won't be coming home for Christmas this year._

Christmas Eve he goes down to the Church after everybody's inside and stands in the back, with his hand clasped over the doubled band of leather on his wrist. Wishing and aching and wanting it to be home. Wanting to _come_ home so badly he could cry. His body's here, but he isn't, and he doesn't know where he is, but he's afraid of hurting the only people he has left to love. Afraid of them seeing all the way down into him, and hurting for him, and he doesn't want that.

Shouldn't have come here. Nowhere else to go.

Ash tries to talk to him. Comes on up to his attic, bringing him his Christmas dinner. Ash has heard enough here and there to make a few sharp guesses - with what's trickling out - about the command Cam's served in these last twelve years. And Ash has done a couple of rough tours of his own. Tells Cam he'll listen, he'll never say a word - not even to Daddy, not even to Momma - he'll never judge him. And Cam slides off the bed (where he's sitting) to the floor and sits there and laughs until he _cries._ Ash waits him out.

"Yeah, well," Cam finally says, wiping his eyes, "if I could just figure out where to start, I, you know, I, I would probably take you up on that, bro. But it's not the part about letting your own people die. Or even die for not much. It's where they keep coming back from the dead and dying all over again, that's, that's the part I'm having a hard time figuring out how to quite explain properly."

#

By December 30th most of the Annual Pilgrimage is gone (back to pillar and post, as Daddy always says.) It's too cold to be sitting out on the porch, but Cam is. Nowhere near as cold as where he was about a month and a half ago, and pretty quiet.

When he sees the woman with the rucksack over her shoulder stop up at the top of the drive, for one moment he thinks she's Family getting here late (happens.) Then she takes a couple of steps forward, and he knows who it is _(can't be. Is.)_ He's up and running before he thinks. She's still walking slowly up the drive. When he reaches her, she stops. He can see she's gaunt and none-too-clean and halfway to out on her feet.

And she looks like Alex, and she raises up her face and meets his eyes, and he knows she isn't. "Take me back," she whispers. "Please."

He puts his arms around her and gathers her in. "Always, baby, always."

#

He puts her in the car and her bag in the back and goes and tells Momma (bounding up the stairs) that he's going for a drive. "Won't be home for supper," he says, kissing her on the cheek. And Momma doesn't ask, although Momma has a perfectly good view of the front yard from her kitchen window.

And he peels out the drive and down the road, and she's already sound asleep in the passenger seat, and even asleep she doesn't look - quite - like Alex.

He stops at the package store for beer (at the window so he doesn't have to get out) and at the drive-through for chicken and biscuits (a scandal and a hissing, but she looks like she can't remember her last meal) and heads on to the motel out on the highway. Gets them checked in, and comes back for her, and she's just waking up (the fact that he could stop the car and get out and walk off without rousing her tells him a lot, and none of it good.) Says she slept last two days ago, maybe three, and she's been walking for about the last day. She's been hitching her way here from Colorado Springs.

"Should'a called me," Cam says indignantly. "You know I'd'a come for you."

"Had to get out of the city. Stay off the radar," she says, her voice slurry with not-having-slept-enough. "Didn't know who was looking."

Something they can talk about later, once he finds out everything that's happened to her since General O'Neill made her disappear. He gets her inside (bungalow on the end), out of her clothes, gets out of his. Cleaned up comes first, then food (and he wants to see what's under those clothes besides dirt; it's a relief to see it's nothing too bad - just a few bruises and blisters - although they're going to have to get a doctor for her left hand; she's been up to her old tricks there.) Her eyes follow the band of black leather hungrily when he coils it on the dresser next to his wristwatch.

This place doesn't run to that much in the way of complementary in-room toiletries, but she has soap and shampoo in her duffel. Along with several thousand dollars, and a passport and driver's license in the name of Alex Tyler. California address. "I cut up the charge cards," she says.

"Good," he says, not paying much attention. Water pressure's shit, but he gets her clean. He towels them off, cranks the heat up high, sits down on the bed, settles her on his lap and makes her eat and give him the high points. Like why she's ... back.

She says that she (Alex) went to the mall with his cousins, and woke up in California, with a man named John Nielsen, who has the distinction of having been an immature clone of General O'Neill from about thirteen years back. O'Neill told Nielsen to hide her and nothing more. Nielsen developed a theory (all by himself) that O'Neill had been supposed to give her the antidote to the Dargol and changed his mind. Nielsen took it upon himself to repair O'Neill's omission.

Cam cradles her head against his neck and closes his eyes. "We'd have to get Sam in on it this time. But we could get you another dose." It's the last thing he wants to say. He's lost her _three times,_ and each time he was sure and certain it was forever. He shouldn't have to lose her a fourth time.

She strokes his shoulder. "Alex was miserable. And she was in love with you too. And it wouldn't do any good." Then she tells him all the rest.

When she's finished talking, he takes the towel and wipes her hands and mouth, sets her off his lap and onto the bed, tidies away the trash. And after that, there's only one last thing he needs to do so they can both come home, so he does it. He picks up the collar and comes back to her, and buckles it around her neck. And before he can say one more word to her she's down off the bed, kneeling on the filthy motel carpet, pressing her face against his thigh. He combs his fingers through her damp hair, parting it so he can stroke the back of her neck and touch the thin leather band.

This is home.

#

Forty-seven year old man. Twenty-two year old girl. Hillfolks marriage for sure, and Cam's people are country, but they aren't hill; that's a solid distinction in his part of the world. Doesn't matter now, any more than the knowledge he carries in his bones, that while she might bury him, she won't survive him.

Even in North Carolina - which is not exactly the _wilderness_ \- if you've got the money, you can get your hands on a good solid chunk of land that's out back of beyond, where you don't have to see anybody from Easter to Christmas and back again if you've a mind to. Easy enough for them to buy, once she gets her hands on her offshore and Swiss accounts. Because the SGC paid her almost what she was worth for twenty years, and there wasn't a penny of it in any of her accounts when the NID went looking. It never was suspicious, because she'd been paying into some of those accounts since the very beginning.

He likes the quiet. She needs it. (If he's going to be honest, he needs it too.) He spends half the next summer building a cabin, the other half camouflaging the access road he's used to truck in the materials. Half nineteenth-century, half twenty-first: the power is part solar (the panels are in a clearing about a mile away, because it gets the most direct sun), part kerosene, part wood stove. Satellite uplink for the computers. All their power is two-step: solar panels and kerosene generators both charge the battery packs that the cabin systems run off of. Everything's as disaster-proof and long-term survivable as Cam can make it.

There are trip-wires on every access-route to the cabin, and here and there through the woods. Nothing lethal. He just wants to know when somebody's out there. Property's posted, but there's always an idiot or two, especially around hunting season. It doesn't matter what hour of the day or night it is when an alarm comes; she drops whatever she's doing and disappears. Doesn't stop to grab a weapon (doesn't stop for anything, including clothes.) They've got weapons caches scattered all over: buried and concealed and waterproofed. Won't come back until she sees him standing on the porch to give her the all-clear.

If he isn't dressed when the alarm goes off he gets dressed, tucks a knife in his boot and a gun into the small of his back and picks up his shotgun and goes looking. There've been false alarms, sure, only to be expected (deer trip the wires sometimes); other times, it's friendlies who don't belong to be there. One time it was hunters tracking a wounded doe. And he went with them, and they heard a shot from up ahead, and he walked them to the (now) dead doe, and then he walked them off his land. One time it was lost hikers (more afraid of him once they saw his shotgun than they were of Death and Hell), and he pointed them toward his access road (it hooks up to an old logging road five miles down, and after that to a back road, and then to a side road, and eventually to the Scenic Motorway.) Sometimes it's been kin, driving up the road and having called ahead. Not many times. His family isn't stupid. Cam goes home to visit sometimes when he feels up to dealing with it. Jackson hasn't gone with him yet, but he has hopes. Maybe. Someday.

Some damage is the kind you can only learn to live with. And some is the kind that heals. No chance at all to sort hers out when they were both still at the SGC; just to layer damage on top of damage, and the worst joke of all was, that was still a better choice for her than being cut loose.

Then. Not now.

Maybe Alex Tyler would have been happy - eventually. And maybe she wouldn't have Ascended when she died. And maybe by the time she died - years and miles away from the SGC and the Stargate Program going public - nobody would have cared one way or the other even if she did. Those were the things Jackson was gambling on when she stole the Dargol: playing the odds and _not telling anybody what the fuck she was up to._ Same as always. Because she was also betting even odds on her being murdered if she'd stayed. Soon. Probably on national television And in the shock and pain and surprise of it, Ascension, and people sure as hell _would_ care then. If the sight of something like that didn't spark World War Last, well, Cam would eat his full old-days kit, P90 included.

And Jackson didn't explain for the same reason she'd never told: no way of knowing how he'd be questioned. She hadn't trusted their 'dear and gentle masters' from the first day she'd gone to work for them. Didn't trust the Pentagon, the Administration, the NID, the IOC. Wouldn't trust any of them with the knowledge of the Ancients, and them knowing she had it would have been her ticket to one of the less savory parts of what passed for government by the people these days. She'd done what she'd always done: the best she could. Trusting him to make the sacrifice. The sacrifice hadn't been her, because she hadn't let him know enough of the details. The sacrifice had been him. She'd known she wouldn't remember the loss. He would.

She hadn't counted on Alex Tyler falling in love with him. Or on finding anybody willing or able to give her the antidote.

It's a selfish comfort these days, lying in bed at night with her asleep beside him, her head pillowed against his heart, to know that (playing the odds) he'll be the one leaving her behind this time, so he'll have her with him for the rest of his life. And it's the kind of comfort that he supposes only their kind could take comfort in that she won't stay behind long, because he knows she intends to follow when he goes. Wherever he goes (anywhere or nowhere, he's neither betting nor predicting after what he's seen.) The idea of Ascension troubles her, and until it happened to her, she didn't believe in anything at all beyond this world. So she means to use him as her guide.

If there's something to find beyond this life, they'll find it together. If there isn't, they'll find that too.

#

**Author's Note:**

> I never can quite leave a story alone once I finish it, and for a lot of them, I also can't come up with a One True Version of What Comes Next. So that's how this happened.


End file.
